It took 16 months to get Evan Gershkovich out of a Russian prison. It took many more months to get the Russian prison out of Evan Gershkovich.
In his dreams, he was still in that tiny cell, just barely wide enough for a single human adult to stand and just barely long enough to take six paces. In his waking hours, there were flares of temper, panic attacks, crying jags. The sound of jangling keys was enough to pull him back into incarceration.
He is better now. The nightmares have faded. And for the first time since he was freed in the most elaborate U.S.-Russian prisoner swap since the Cold War, Mr. Gershkovich is ready to publicly talk about his ordeal. About the Russians that he met both in and outside prison. About the country’s slide back into repression. About becoming a pawn in a geopolitical game of intrigue and hostage trading.
“They didn’t break me as a human, which they can do, and they choose who to do that to,” Mr. Gershkovich, 34, his head still shaved as it was in prison, said in an interview. His captors opted against subjecting him to their worst torture techniques, knowing that he had been arrested on trumped-up espionage charges to be a bargaining chip for President Vladimir V. Putin to force the release of a Russian agent held in the West. “The real things I have to deal with are psychological.”
Mr. Gershkovich was a Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in March 2023 when he visited Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, to report a story on Russia’s military industrial capacity as it waged war against its neighbor Ukraine. While he sat in a steakhouse with a local union boss he was interviewing, masked agents from the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor to the K.G.B., swept into the room, grabbed him, shoved him to the floor, handcuffed him and put a black sack over his head.
Now, two years after his release, brokered by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Gershkovich is publishing a book called “This Cursed Beautiful Land,” out on Tuesday. It is meant not just as his own “captivity memoir,” as he calls it, but essentially a captivity memoir of the broader Russian population living in what amounts to Mr. Putin’s open-air prison.
“I hope people take away not just something about the resilience of the human spirit, how we adapt in these challenging circumstances,” he said, “but also how the people are living yet again under this autocratic regime in Russia.”
Mr. Gershkovich describes a political analyst facing 20 years behind bars for voicing the wrong analysis, protesters against the war looking at 15 years and even a food writer sentenced to six years. “Russia’s changing drastically,” he said.
The son of Soviet Jewish émigrés to the United States, Mr. Gershkovich was raised in Princeton, N.J., and moved to Moscow in 2017 to explore and report on his family’s home. His detention shortly after Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine was the first time an American journalist had been arrested for supposedly spying in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and triggered an intense international effort to free him, led by the Journal’s editors.
The entirety of the case against him, according to Mr. Gershkovich, came down to a document with three sentences “proving” that he worked for the C.I.A.:
“U.S. media is used by the C.I.A. for intelligence-gathering purposes, according to an informed source.”
“The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau is used by the C.I.A. for intelligence-gathering purposes, according to the source.”
“Evan Gershkovich belongs to the apparatus of the C.I.A.”
That was it. An anonymous source supposedly said that the C.I.A. used the Journal. Mr. Gershkovich worked for the Journal. Therefore he worked for the C.I.A. The twisted syllogism was maddening and laughable at the same time. But it was enough to get him sentenced to 16 years.
He spent most of the time in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison and knew from the beginning that his detention was all about making a trade with the West. Mr. Putin was known to be especially intent on freeing Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin imprisoned in Germany after gunning down a Chechen separatist in a brazen daylight murder in Berlin.
“When I was arrested, it was a shock, but not a surprise,” Mr. Gershkovich said. “A shock in the sense of, wow, they really crossed that line, they’ve escalated to foreign correspondent. Not a surprise in that it made sense in the logic of the regime.” Still, it was daunting to “see what happens to a person when they don’t have control over their situation.”
Perhaps the most chilling moment came in a conversation with a Russian investigator. “In every country, there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,” the investigator told him. “In your situation, we clearly gathered enough evidence to imprison you. Otherwise, we would have just poisoned you.”
In Russia, there has long been a sort of romanticism about “sitting” in prison, as the term goes, a sense of purifying nobility. As Leo Tolstoy famously said, “The only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison.” And so part of Mr. Gershkovich even wondered whether he as a Russian American secretly wanted to be arrested. “It helped me cope by thinking, you know what, I’ve kind of joined the ranks,” he said. “Solzhenitsyn was in this prison. Yuli Daniel, who’s a writer hero of mine, was in this prison. Ginzburg went through this prison.”
But after much contemplation, he has decided that no, he did not intentionally put himself at risk. “One of the grosser questions” he has been asked is whether “it was worth it.” No, it was not. “What I went through was horrific and I wouldn’t want to go through it again,” he said. There was a moment, he added, when he did “have that pang of kind of guilt” knowing that “I have a way out and the Russian political prisoners” did not.
In his book, Mr. Gershkovich, a fluent Russian speaker, describes his relationships with Seryoga, his cellmate most of the time, and Nikita, another cellmate who later was released and killed on the front line in Ukraine. And he describes the lowest point, when the Russian political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny suddenly died in another prison in February 2024 at a moment when it looked like he might be part of a trade that would also free Mr. Gershkovich.
“The absolutely broke-me-for-a-while moment was when Navalny died,” he said in the interview. “I berated myself for not thinking about him first. What I thought about was myself first because a swap was starting to come together.” He thought he might be locked up for years.
Eventually, Mr. Biden arranged a complicated swap that involved 24 prisoners and seven countries. He helped seal the deal with a key telephone call in July 2024, less than two hours before announcing that he was dropping out of the race for re-election because of concerns about his age.
Mr. Biden was at Joint Base Andrews the night that Mr. Gershkovich and other liberated Americans landed. Looking thin but relieved, Mr. Gershkovich hugged the president. In his book, he disclosed that Mr. Biden told him that if he ever wanted to talk, not as president and journalist but as people, his door would be open. In the interview, Mr. Gershkovich would not say if he took him up on the offer.
His release ended one journey and started another. “I was overcome with guilt” that his freedom resulted in the release of a cold killer like Mr. Krasikov. For a while, “I would freak out if I wasn’t eating lunch at the right time” because he was so accustomed to prison rituals. “I felt a tug of longing for prison,” he writes in the book.
After much therapy, he has moved on. “I feel really back to my normal self,” he said. “It took a while. I think that probably is normal. But I was able to work through some of those things. Not just with time, but the actual effort of processing.”
He lives in Berlin now with his Russian girlfriend, Masha Borzunova, a journalist who waited for him during his captivity. He is reporting again but never did get the interview with Mr. Putin that he cheekily requested as the last line of the pardon application he was forced to sign. “It was just another way to emphasize that I am a journalist, that I remain a journalist,” he said.
Would he ever go back to Russia? Not with Mr. Putin in charge. But for all Mr. Gershkovich went through, he still imagines a day when the country may be free again, or free enough for him to return. “It’s a country that meant a lot to me, it’s where much of my family’s from, it’s where my girlfriend’s from,” he said. “I would love to one day be able to go back. I don’t think that’s going to be the case any time soon.” But, he said, “one can hope.”
