On the recordFebruary 3, 2011
In early 1983, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was in an 8-by-10 foot cell in a Siberian prison when jailers permitted him to read the latest issue of the official Communist Party newspaper. The front page was filled with global condemnations of American President Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on the walls and whispering through plumbing pipes, political prisoners spread the word. Rather than being demoralized by the criticisms, they were ecstatic. The leader of the free world had spoken the truth. There was hope. By the end of the decade, hope became freedom, freedom for the hundreds of thousands imprisoned in the Soviet gulag and for the hundreds of millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Countless men and women of courage and determination, their names lost to history, stood up to tyranny and won a great victory with a leader whose name will forever be remembered by history. Lech Walesa, the founder of the valiant Solidarity movement, said this of President Reagan: 'We in Poland . . . owe him our liberty.'
