On March 29, 2023, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about how Russia’s economy was teetering on the edge of disaster as its invasion of Ukraine entered its second year. An oligarch delivered the oh-wow quote: “There will be no money next year.”
Landing a piece on the front page of the Journal should have meant a celebratory day for one of the article’s co-authors, a gregarious Moscow correspondent named Evan Gershkovich.
Instead it marked the start of Gershkovich’s Kafkaesque nightmare.
As Journal readers were being treated to his front-page work, Gershkovich was being detained by Russian security forces while working on another story in Yekaterinburg, a city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Russia’s Federal Security Service said he’d been arrested on suspicions of trying to obtain secrets about the Russian military on behalf of the American government, making him the first American journalist taken into custody and accused of spying in the country since the Cold War.
The events of that day – and of the long months to come, leading up to Gershkovich, 32, being sentenced to 16 years in prison on July 19 – turned him into a symbol of worldwide threats to press freedom. Hashtags sprouted condemning the trumped-up charges against him; editorials lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Before his arrest, Gershkovich had been living his dream life. He’d bet on himself, leaving a safe job in the United States as a New York Times news assistant and moving to Moscow, where he reported for the Moscow Times and Agence France-Presse. He then scored a prestige posting in January 2022 as the Journal’s Moscow correspondent.
To cope with the months of uncertainty, Gershkovich’s sister, Danielle – who’d made frequent appearances at journalism conferences and in news interviews to advocate for his release – had been reading Franz Kafka, an author recommended from the prison reading list of Washington Post columnist Jason Rezaian, who was released in 2016 after being detained for 1½ years on false espionage charges in Iran.
“Everything is so absurd to me,” Danielle told The Washington Post in March shortly before he brother marked one year in Russian prison. “That absurdity in Kafka’s writing is something I can relate to.”