The guards opened the peephole in his cell six times an hour. Over time he learned to recognize them by their eyes. During the first night he turned on the television and discovered that the main subject of the Rossiya-1 political talk show was him, Evan Gershkovich, the journalist who on March 29, 2023 went to meet with a source at the Bukowski Grill in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals. He was investigating the increase in Russian military production and the union leader he had met showed him some sheets with figures copied from official documents. Suddenly, several hooded men burst into the restaurant with an almost absurd phrase: "I'm sure we had that table reserved." They were agents of the FSB, successor to the KGB. They knocked him down, handcuffed him and covered his head. In the van, when he answered that he worked for The Wall Street Journal, they hit him and asked him again who he really worked for. Gershkovich felt a strange relief when he was formally informed of the accusation. He understood that they did not intend to make him disappear, but rather to turn him into a piece for a future exchange. "It was a system that I already knew, I wrote about torture in Russian prisons, I knew that Lefortovo, the prison where I ended up, was considered one of the best. But it is one thing to know all that and quite another to see it from the inside," he explains from the United States. His odyssey between the walls of Putinism is written in the 400 pages of This Beautiful Cursed Earth (Debate), which goes on sale on October 1.
In his 16 months in prison he learned "that Russia carefully chooses who it treats humanely and who it destroys, in my case they knew there would be an international protest, that I was a journalist and that one day I would write about it, they did not torture me. Many other people receive completely different treatment, like Victoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist, who died in captivity."
In Lefortovo, Serioga (the character on which Gershkovich superimposes several cellmates) becomes his survival teacher. He explains that the prison is governed by a parallel law in which each gesture determines the prisoner's reputation. When entering a cell you must clean your feet; You should not offer your hand before finding out for what item the other is detained; and you have to use a different cloth for the floor, sink, table or toilet. "We shit where we eat," Serioga summarized in the first days.
"What prison confirmed for me was that resignation, perhaps more than apathy, towards the idea that in Russia events are beyond people's control. I perceived it among my cellmates, prison officials and even FSB agents. They all feel dragged by a chain of events and by history, instead of thinking that they can influence it," explains the reporter: "Above all there is a State represented by a single person, who is the one who makes the final decisions, everyone feels that individually they can do very little to change course."
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey (USA) in October 1991, exactly two months before the disappearance of the Soviet Union. His parents, Soviet Jews, had emigrated in 1979. Russian was his first language and at home he was not Evan, but Vanya or, when he misbehaved, "Ivan Mikhailovich." He grew up eating borscht and kotleti, watching Soviet films, and listening to his mother sing Katyusha to him as a lullaby. In 2017 he left the United States to join The Moscow Times as a reporter.
In Moscow he ran around like so many correspondents covering the anti-Putin protests, the judicial proceedings, the poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, the invasion of Ukraine and the economic consequences of the war. He also saw the open, cosmopolitan Moscow he had known disappear. After the invasion, many Russian journalists fled and foreign correspondents began to receive visas of only three months. Arrest was imaginable, but seemed remote. Investigating tank production during a war crossed a line that the Kremlin had already decided to erase: "Investigating Russian military production during the war may have gone too far, but isn't that what journalism is all about?"
In prison "the most difficult moment was Navalny's death." I knew that the exchanges ended up happening. "It seemed that the first plan was to exchange Paul Whelan [another American accused of espionage], Navalny and me for Krasikov [a regime hitman detained in Germany]. "My reaction was to think: My God, I'm going to stay here for a long time."
Why does the expression "this beautiful cursed land" seem to you to be the appropriate moral and emotional description of Russia?
The word curse reflects the tortured, tormented and difficult history of Russia. He seems unable to escape his autocratic tendencies, his desire to build an empire, his repressive impulses, and his belief in the primacy of the state over the individual. The 1990s seem like a brief anomaly in which it moved toward another model, before returning to its historical pattern... And the countries in its orbit become trapped in that dynamic because Moscow builds empires.
In mid-June 2024, when his case was to be tried in Yekaterinburg, Gershkovich left Lefortovo after almost 15 months. The most difficult farewell was that of Serioga: they hugged at the cell door and, before the guard closed it, Evan saw him looking at his empty bed, with his shoulders hunched. When he left, he saw the sky for the first time without a metal net above it. The transfer to Yekaterinburg took two days in a Stolipin wagon, originally designed to transport people and livestock. The cells were overcrowded: up to ten prisoners occupied spaces designed for six and took turns sleeping on wooden boards placed on three levels. "In the second prison I met many more people, common criminals who did not ask themselves great moral questions: war, for example, was simply a way to get out of prison." Others had already fought, "they had returned and looked at the war as a source of adrenaline and as a place where they had found meaning for their lives." But he also found "political prisoners who had been tortured and who could spend 15 years in terrible conditions."
In war "soldiers can find a purpose, there is a brotherhood and they are fighting for some cause, whether right or wrong, moral or immoral," he explains, leaning on the table, his eyes wide open, as if he were still contemplating the bright and dark enormity of Russia. His second prison was in the Urals, in a poor area: "Many of those men had grown up without many aspirations and suddenly the war offered them meaning. Some returned, committed another crime and wanted to return to the front."
What did you learn about Russia during your time in prison?
One man told me he was going to war because he was facing 15 years in prison and had just had a son. The amount of money he would receive from the State was so enormous for someone in his situation that he thought it would even be worth dying: his wife would receive an immense compensation. Some people sign contracts because they believe Putin's propaganda about Russians defending Ukraine or fighting the Nazis, but many others see war as a good source of income, a way out of a desperate situation, or a kind of lottery ticket.
His new cell, paradoxically, was bigger and brighter than the one in Moscow, but the conditions were worse: showers covered in cigarette butts, mattresses so thin that the box springs dug into the back, poorer quality food and no television, radio or refrigerator. His new companion was Nikita, a 19-year-old young man, very thin, with gray skin and sunken eyes, who had been isolated for four days. Seeing him enter, he could only repeat: "Thank God." The Tsentral was a black prison, dominated in part by the prisoners themselves: during the night messages, cigarettes and merchandise circulated using ropes made of plastic bags, while the pipes functioned as telephones.
In the book, Russia's transformation under Putin came not as a sudden turn, but as a gradual suffocation. The most disturbing thing for Gershkovich is that this evolution always coexisted with an appearance of normality. While police beat protesters, restaurants remained full.
How much of traditional Russian political apathy is true indifference and how much constitutes a rational response to fear?
In the book there is a chapter titled 'The Land of Apathy', although I sometimes wonder if that expression is too insensitive. In 2017 there was danger, but it still seemed reasonable to have an opinion, cast a protest vote, or even go out and demonstrate. Now Pavel Siutkin, a food historian whom I interviewed about the origin of borsch and how inflation affected bakeries, has been sentenced to six years in prison for a comment about Bucha's crimes. He didn't say anything particularly revolutionary.
That is why Gershkovich believes that "from Europe or the United States it is very easy to ask why Russians do not protest against Putin or to claim that they are complicit: but in those circumstances, staying out of politics seems like a rational response, and it takes a very particular kind of character to consciously decide that you are willing to suffer that. Until it happens in your own country it is very difficult to judge."
Regarding his case, he confesses since the war began "we all thought that the worst thing they could do was not renew our visa. We talked about the possibility of an arrest, but we assigned it a small probability", so that "when it happened, it was not a surprise: it was a shock. It was not surprising because it responded to the logic of the system, the shock was seeing that they were willing to go that far."
When he had become accustomed to not making decisions, to sharing protocols with his cellmate for defecating or masturbating, his lawyer told him that he would soon be free.
"It looks like it's going to happen," she said.
-What is going to happen?
-The exchange.
Gershkovich confesses that at first he felt "overwhelming guilt" because his release came at the cost of freeing the hitman Krasikov: "I hope that the good achieved with the exchange outweighs the damage."
