Evan Gershkovich on prison, Russia and liberty

CULTURE-Q

By Alexander Marrow

Nov 7 - When masked agents of Russia's FSB security service wrestled Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to the floor of a restaurant in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on March 29, 2023, he became the first US journalist to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War. He was later sentenced to 16 years in prison before being freed in an East-West prisoner swap in August 2024. Gershkovich, The Journal and the US government all strongly deny the allegation that he was a spy.

In his recently released book "This Cursed Beautiful Land," Gershkovich, an American citizen whose parents emigrated from the Soviet Union before he was born, details his experience in prison and the cast of characters that he met along the way, from cellmates to investigators. All the while, he continued reporting, uncovering details of what he says was an elaborate FSB sting operation and the mechanics of the swap that would ultimately set him free.

Speaking to Reuters from Canada, the latest stop on a global book tour, Gershkovich reflects on his arrest, his time in prison and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the book, we read of your two personas: the American, Evan, and the Russian, Vanya. How do they differ and does Vanya live on now you're out of prison?

My American friends always would say that I'm super pessimistic, and then my Russian friends would say that I'm much too optimistic. I always thought that it was in between, but in prison I clearly became more Vanya in the sense that my reaction was I can't change anything about this. It was this fatalistic resignation to the reality. I had American friends saying, “We're gonna get you out tomorrow." And I knew that wasn't the case. This was gonna be a really hard swap. So it's resigning yourself to it and also treating it with dark humor.

You can't deal with the situation, so you might as well laugh at it. And then I get back after the swap and that side starts receding Evan starts coming back. I'm living in the Western world again, I'm speaking English all the time. But I think I found a perfect balance. My girlfriend's Russian, my family hasn't changed, so I speak Russian in my daily life, but I'm not so fatalistic and deeply resigned to the situation around me anymore. I think my optimism is back.

Let's go back to your arrest in March 2023. Did you feel vulnerable then?

I actually felt more vulnerable in late 2022 than I did in early 2023, when I was no longer followed . In late 2022, the environment was shifting. The community of foreign correspondents : has this unwritten rule of us being treated as quasi-diplomats changed?

And then there was the address when Vladimir Putin told the FSB to do a better job of catching spies. I was talking about this with a colleague who has Russian citizenship and a foreign citizenship and we still thought that if you’re a foreigner, you still have this special . So I gained this false sense of security in early 2023 that I think helped me feel. There was a naivete, of course, but I think I was just misreading signals. They'd done a good job of making me feel more comfortable.

You write in the book at one point that you felt some pride at being on the inside, a thought that you immediately pushed out of your mind. Looking back now, how do you reflect on the experience?

I think it's easier for the person in prison, in a way. Once you get your bearings and you understand what's happening to you, you can figure out, okay, I can handle this in a certain way. But your loved ones, it's a black box to them the whole time. And there's a helplessness to it and that never really goes away. But having ended up there, I think one coping mechanism I had was I can't really change the fact that I'm here now and I have to accept it.

And it is, frankly, an interesting place to be. So I might as well report on it and try to understand it and come away with something valuable for the rest of us. We have all these brilliant books about the Gulag and that history in the Soviet period because Stalin and his government arrested scores of writers and journalists, and we came away with some of the Soviet Union's best literature.

The difference with mine is I have a foot in both worlds. I wasn't a Soviet citizen or a Russian citizen getting arrested. I was an American with a Russian-Soviet background. So I can try to place myself in that canon of literature, but also be doing the work of the foreign correspondent and explaining this place that has been an enigma to foreigners for so long, and be your tour guide into this place.

You moved from Moscow’s Lefortovo prison to a larger prison in Yekaterinburg and really seemed to take it in your stride. Did you feel yourself hardening while in Lefortovo?

Absolutely. I had this one cellmate ; I describe him as a street kid, a street brawler, a kind of “patzan.” He had a very stoic way of approaching prison. I'm naturally a bit stoic and he had a really tough exterior. And I think that started happening with me. I had decided I won't let myself cry, but I also won't let myself get angry at the system. So what happens is you start crafting this toughened exterior over time. And I think that's a coping mechanism and a survival tactic. When I got to the second prison, I was starved of and dying for human interaction. It's almost like no matter what, I was probably more steeled to it and more ready for it, but I was also so eager to have any kinds of conversations that I could have after 15 months of serious isolation.

How has your experience shaped your view of Russia?

I think to be disillusioned with a place, you had to have had illusions in the first place. I've described my arrest as a shock, but not a surprise, because it's not a surprise that they might do a thing like that.

To me, it was a shock that they crossed this red line of not treating a foreign correspondent anymore like a quasi-diplomat who you kick out. We know from independent polling that more than two-thirds of Russians want the war to end. But they also don't seem to want to state their opinion about the war because that can land them in prison for up to 10 years. So, are they pro-Putin but anti-war? Are they pro-war but anti-Putin? Are they anti-both? We don't really know. And prison felt like a lot of the same kinds of characters, people who had checked out politically.

I met a prison guard who told me he was trying not to focus on what was going on around him. And I asked him what he thinks about the war, and he tells me he can't talk about that. So that was, I think, a confirmation that even people in the system don't agree with everything that's going on.

You intersperse the book with snippets of wisdom from the books you read during your time in prison. How many did you read?

I think it was 75. Prisoners are some of the best readers because you're so isolated from the outside sensory world that when you read it's an incredibly intoxicating experience. It's very psychedelic. I mean, reading already is, right? You just have words on a page and then you imagine images from these words on a page, but in prison it's especially so because you're really living it. It felt like talking to real people when I was reading.

What's next for you?

Back to reporting.

The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News.

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