The reason given for denial of the visa was that he had been given access, at some point in his career, to information vital to Soviet national security and could not now be allowed to leave. Sharansky was denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973. They were married in a friend's apartment, in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as the USSR only recognized civil marriage and not religious marriage. In the Soviet Union, his application to marry Avital was denied by the authorities. Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah.

He took his current Hebrew name in 1986 when he was freed from Soviet incarceration as part of a prisoner exchange and received an Israeli passport with his new name. In his spare time, Sharansky would coach young chess players at the famous chess club in the park.

Sharansky lived near Sokolniki Park, on Kolodezniy Pereulok (Water-well Lane). Īfter Sharansky graduated from university, he began working for a secret state research laboratory. Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996. When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind.

Sharansky graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, usually against adults. He was attending physics and mathematics high school No.17 in Donetsk. She was permitted to follow her son to Israel six months after he left the Soviet Union. His mother, Ida Milgrom, visited him in prison and stubbornly waged a nine-year battle for her son's release from Soviet prison and labor camps.

His father, Boris Shcharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed. Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on ( )20 January 1948 in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union.

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