01 April 23
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It’s painful and surreal to write these words: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is being held by Russian authorities on espionage charges.
I met Evan five years ago, not long after he arrived in Moscow as a twentysomething reporter full of ideas, hustle, and smarts. He was funny, acerbic, and kindhearted, not to mention a skilled chef—he had spent several months in the kitchen of a serious New York City restaurant before he turned to journalism. We cooked together, went to the banya together, partied together.
Above all, Evan is a hell of a reporter, industrious and energetic. He filed stories for the Moscow Times, his first journalistic home, that often scooped the rest of the Western press corps. During the pandemic, he spoke to Russian medical students forced to treat COVID patients and to statisticians who feared that the state was manipulating data on COVID deaths. In January, 2022, after a stint at Agence France-Presse, he started at the Journal. He was happy; his friends were proud of him. He had pulled off what he had worked so hard for: a staff job with a major American newspaper, covering a place that meant so much to him. Russia could be maddening and fascinating in equal measure, but never boring or unimportant.
In the years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, people in the U.S. often asked how foreign correspondents managed to do their jobs in a place like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. During my and Evan’s time there, the country shifted in an unmistakably repressive direction, transitioning from an autocracy that pretended, however flimsily, to be a democracy to a state that didn’t bother hiding its claws. The Russia story became more monotone, less a madcap collision of wealth and opportunity and ambition—as it had been in the early Putin years—than one increasingly defined by menace and violence. The space for independent journalism, however marginal and niche it had been already, shrunk even further.
Our Russian journalist friends faced countless pressure and constraints, mainly of the financial and professional kind—one independent outlet after another closed down or was forced to—but more immediate dangers were also ever present. In the summer of 2019, Ivan Golunov, an investigative reporter for Meduza, a news site based in Riga, was arrested on a fabricated drug charge, apparently in retaliation for his coverage of corruption in the Moscow burial industry. He was freed after four days, the result of mass protests organized by his journalistic colleagues.
But Golunov’s enemies were local, relatively small-time criminals, not the truly powerful ones who occupy top positions in the Kremlin and F.S.B. If you were up against forces like that, your fate could be very different. In 2020, Ivan Safronov, a former journalist for Kommersant, a once serious, hard-hitting daily in Moscow that had morphed into something more safe and milquetoast, was arrested on charges of espionage. Supposedly, his coverage of the sale of Russian fighter jets was secret cover for his dealings with Czech intelligence services. This story was as unconvincing as it sounds, but, in 2022, Safronov was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. He remains there today.
Yet, for a long time, arrests were rare. So were physical attacks. The macabre insight of the Russian state and its security services was that you didn’t have to jail or kill that many reporters for the rest to get the hint. The Kremlin preferred more banal, quasi-legalistic methods of constraining the work of individual journalists, such as designating them “foreign agents,” a label that comes with all manner of burdensome administration, and which scares off sources and contacts. Whole outlets—such as Proekt, an investigative Web site founded by reporters who banded together after their previous outlets were shuttered—were deemed “undesirable,” and this, in effect, criminalized just about everything connected to them. Proekt was forced to shut down; five of its journalists were named “foreign agents.”
What was hard to explain—to our friends and family back home, to our editors, even to ourselves—was the degree to which we, as foreign correspondents, continued to occupy a position of relative privilege and safety. The bosses and owners of our media organizations were in New York; they couldn’t readily be pressured or blackmailed. Putin can’t close down the Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker. But, on a more basic level, we weren’t worth the trouble: our audiences were far away, and nothing published in English was going to threaten Putin’s hold on power or the stability of the political system. And the Kremlin long ago gave up caring about its image in the West. So we were largely left alone to report and write as we pleased.
Then came the war. Last February, Russia invaded Ukraine, and what had been a gradual process of shrinking freedoms took on new speed. TV Rain, an independent television channel with a large online following, was taken off the air and banned entirely. So was Echo Moskvy, a liberal-leaning radio station. A package of wartime censorship laws, passed on March 4, 2022, criminalized virtually any honest, factual reporting on Russia’s invasion. Just about every Russian journalist who Evan and I knew fled the country within a matter of days; those who stayed had no choice but to leave the profession. I was in Ukraine at the time; Evan was in Moscow. He quickly left Russia, too, unsure of how to continue to do his job under such conditions.
But then, over the summer, he went back. His Russian visa and journalistic accreditation were still valid, and it seemed like the old logic might still apply: foreigners could get away with reporting that would be far more problematic, if not off limits entirely, for Russians. The Times and the Guardian, among others, had correspondents who cycled through Russia. Evan and I spoke a lot about his choice. He felt that he had the rare journalistic privilege of reporting from the country that had launched the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War, and that understanding what both the élite and the wider population felt about that was an urgent journalistic assignment. The magnetic tug of duty and curiosity made sense to me. In fact, on some level, I was jealous.
Evan came and went from Moscow. He told me of the strange paradox of life in the capital: the context for everything—politics, the economy, how people related to one another—had changed, perhaps irreparably, but on the surface it often felt like things remained the same as ever. In July, he wrote about the maniacal drive among many in Moscow to act as if everything were normal; he reported from verandas and courtyard parties, an experience that was dizzying and a bit soul-crushing. “While the police patrolling Moscow’s streets are now armed with assault rifles, they are busier handing out fines for public drinking than putting down dissent,” he wrote.
Russia became even more of a black box, increasingly difficult for those outside to picture or imagine, and this made Evan’s work all the more vital and interesting to read. It was harder for him to report, but not impossible. Even state officials and local parliamentarians were sometimes willing to talk. In December, Evan was among four authors of a massive Wall Street Journal report on Putin’s decison-making and over-all awareness of the truth of what was happening in Ukraine. Putin, the article said, “found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent world view and shelter him from discouraging news.”
Evan travelled around Russia. He was followed on just about every trip, but somehow it seemed routine, expected, nothing to get worked up about. In March, in a bracing dispatch from Pskov, a northwestern town that’s home to a number of military units that took heavy losses in Ukraine, he wrote about how the provinces had adjusted to the grim reality of the war. A local psychologist told him of a noticeable spike in clients last fall, after Putin announced a military draft. But then, as Evan described in his article, anxiety in the area receded. The war “is not as scary as it was,” the psychologist said. “It became something normal.”
I don’t know exactly what Evan was working on in recent days. According to Russian press accounts, it may have had something to do with the military and the Wagner Group, which has supplied mercenaries to the war effort. Perhaps the particulars of this reporting triggered the paranoid minds in the F.S.B., who even before the war were primed to see spies and agents everywhere. The incentive to ferret them out has only increased; Putin has recently made several appeals for the F.S.B. to be on alert for those seeking to undermine and destabilize the Russian state. An F.S.B. directive issued last December bars the discussion or dissemination of even nonclassified information relating to the country’s armed forces. To make clear that journalism, not spying, is Evan’s métier feels a clarification so obvious as to be offensive to have to put in writing.
The last time an American journalist was arrested in Russia and charged with espionage was 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, was held in Lefortovo for two weeks, before being released in exchange for a Soviet diplomat who had been caught in an F.B.I. sting operation in New York. This is not, in other words, the kind of thing that happens all the time, even in a climate of worsening relations between Washington and Moscow. And it could not have occurred without Putin’s personal approval. His spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, let on as much on Thursday, when he commented on Evan’s case. Normally, when journalists ask Peskov to react to a politically motivated arrest, he demurs, instead acting as if it’s solely a matter for law enforcement and the courts. But Peskov was more confident and direct in responding to Evan’s detention. “We’re not talking about suspicions,” he said. “He was caught red-handed.”
Speculation immediately focussed on Russia’s likely endgame: an exchange for high-value Russians held in American custody. It’s quite possible that the Kremlin viewed the trade from last December, when it handed over Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star, and received Viktor Bout, the arms trafficker, as a successful and worthy precedent. Perhaps Russia wants to receive Vadim Krasikov, an F.S.B.-hired assassin held in a German prison. Around the time of the Griner-Bout trade, press reports indicated that Russia had asked for Krasikov, too. Talk also immediately swirled around a couple arrested last December in Slovenia—a certain “Maria and Ludwig”—who were undercover Russian spies. “Even as preparations are under way for a trial in Slovenia,” a report in the Guardian read, “backdoor negotiations are taking place between Moscow and western countries to exchange them for a person or people currently in jail in Russia.”
But, if a prisoner swap is the Kremlin’s endgame, Evan may have a long time to wait in Lefortovo Prison. Russian policy is not to trade anyone until they are convicted. “Certain exchanges that took place in the past took place for people who were already serving sentences,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said. “Let’s see how this story will develop.” And the prisoners that the Kremlin is most likely to want are held in Europe, not the U.S., making the negotiations for a potential trade all the more complicated.
It’s painful, and surreal, to write these words: Evan, Lefortovo, prisoner exchange. Throughout the years, Evan and I learned that Russia is a place that can surprise and disappoint you, even as it holds your attention—yet never could I imagine all of those feelings would collide in such a story, one that I wish I never had to write.
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