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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/29\/us\/politics\/evan-gershkovich-interview.html?emc=edit_ufn_20260929&nl=from-the-times&segment_id=227269",
    "parsed_content": "Trump AdministrationFact Check of Fraud ClaimsNational Citizenship DatabaseTrump InvestigationsVideo: Jack Smith HearingApproval RatingAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Russian Prison That Evan Gershkovich Carried HomeIn an interview, Mr. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was imprisoned in Russia for 16 months, described his ordeal and the moment that nearly broke him.Listen \u00b7 9:47 min Share full article\u201cThe real things I have to deal with are psychological,\u201d Evan Gershkovich said.Credit...Todd Heisler\/The New York TimesBy Peter BakerPeter Baker previously served as a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and wrote a book with his wife about the rise of Vladimir V. Putin. He reported from Washington.Sept. 29, 2026See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google 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\u2019s slide back into repression. About becoming a pawn in a geopolitical game of intrigue and hostage trading.\u201cThey didn\u2019t break me as a human, which they can do, and they choose who to do that to,\u201d 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. \u201cThe real things I have to deal with are psychological.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMr. 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\u2019s 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 \u201cThis Cursed Beautiful Land,\u201d out on Tuesday. It is meant not just as his own \u201ccaptivity memoir,\u201d as he calls it, but essentially a captivity memoir of the broader Russian population living in what amounts to Mr. Putin\u2019s open-air prison.\u201cI hope people take away not just something about the resilience of the human spirit, how we adapt in these challenging circumstances,\u201d he said, \u201cbut also how the people are living yet again under this autocratic regime in Russia.\u201dImageMr. Gershkovich was freed two years ago in the most elaborate U.S.-Russian prisoner swap since the Cold War.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. 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. \u201cRussia\u2019s changing drastically,\u201d he said.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe son of Soviet Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s editors.Want to stay updated on what\u2019s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we\u2019ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.The entirety of the case against him, according to Mr. Gershkovich, came down to a document with three sentences \u201cproving\u201d that he worked for the C.I.A.:\u201cU.S. media is used by the C.I.A. for intelligence-gathering purposes, according to an informed source.\u201d\u201cThe Wall Street Journal\u2019s Moscow bureau is used by the C.I.A. for intelligence-gathering purposes, according to the source.\u201d\u201cEvan Gershkovich belongs to the apparatus of the C.I.A.\u201dThat 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.Sign up for the On Politics newsletter. It's a pivotal moment for American politics. Join us for 2026 and beyond. Get it sent to your inbox.He spent most of the time in Moscow\u2019s 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.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cWhen I was arrested, it was a shock, but not a surprise,\u201d Mr. Gershkovich said. \u201cA shock in the sense of, wow, they really crossed that line, they\u2019ve escalated to foreign correspondent. Not a surprise in that it made sense in the logic of the regime.\u201d Still, it was daunting to \u201csee what happens to a person when they don\u2019t have control over their situation.\u201dImageMr. Gershkovich in a defendants\u2019 cage during a court hearing in 2023 to appeal his arrest in Moscow.Credit...Natalia Kolesnikova\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty ImagesPerhaps the most chilling moment came in a conversation with a Russian investigator. \u201cIn every country, there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,\u201d the investigator told him. \u201cIn your situation, we clearly gathered enough evidence to imprison you. Otherwise, we would have just poisoned you.\u201dIn Russia, there has long been a sort of romanticism about \u201csitting\u201d in prison, as the term goes, a sense of purifying nobility. As Leo Tolstoy famously said, \u201cThe only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison.\u201d And so part of Mr. Gershkovich even wondered whether he as a Russian American secretly wanted to be arrested. \u201cIt helped me cope by thinking, you know what, I\u2019ve kind of joined the ranks,\u201d he said. \u201cSolzhenitsyn was in this prison. Yuli Daniel, who\u2019s a writer hero of mine, was in this prison. Ginzburg went through this prison.\u201dBut after much contemplation, he has decided that no, he did not intentionally put himself at risk. \u201cOne of the grosser questions\u201d he has been asked is whether \u201cit was worth it.\u201d No, it was not. \u201cWhat I went through was horrific and I wouldn\u2019t want to go through it again,\u201d he said. There was a moment, he added, when he did \u201chave that pang of kind of guilt\u201d knowing that \u201cI have a way out and the Russian political prisoners\u201d did not.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn 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.\u201cThe absolutely broke-me-for-a-while moment was when Navalny died,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cI berated myself for not thinking about him first. What I thought about was myself first because a swap was starting to come together.\u201d 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.ImageFormer President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arranged the swap that freed Mr. Gershkovich, which involved 24 prisoners and seven countries.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. 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.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTHis release ended one journey and started another. \u201cI was overcome with guilt\u201d that his freedom resulted in the release of a cold killer like Mr. Krasikov. For a while, \u201cI would freak out if I wasn\u2019t eating lunch at the right time\u201d because he was so accustomed to prison rituals. \u201cI felt a tug of longing for prison,\u201d he writes in the book.After much therapy, he has moved on. \u201cI feel really back to my normal self,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201dHe 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. \u201cIt was just another way to emphasize that I am a journalist, that I remain a journalist,\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a country that meant a lot to me, it\u2019s where much of my family\u2019s from, it\u2019s where my girlfriend\u2019s from,\u201d he said. \u201cI would love to one day be able to go back. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to be the case any time soon.\u201d But, he said, \u201cone can hope.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-29T04:01:07+00:00",
    "author_name": "Peter Baker",
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