During his nearly 15 months in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison, Evan Gershkovich perused Russian literary classics like “War and Peace” and played slow mail chess with his father in the United States. He tries to stay in shape during the one hour exercise period he is allowed each day.
Friends who correspond with him describe Mr. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, as positive, strong and rarely discouraged, despite Russia’s official anger at President Vladimir V. Putin.
“He may have ups and downs like everyone else, but he remains confident in himself, in his rightness,” said Maria Borzunova, a Russian journalist and friend of Mr. Gershkovich.
Mr. Gershkovich went on trial Wednesday and faces up to 20 years in prison on an espionage charge that he, his employer and the U.S. State Department vehemently deny.
He appeared in court in the large industrial city of Yekaterinburg, east of Moscow, where he was initially detained and where he was recently transferred after more than a year of imprisonment in Moscow.
Shortly before the trial began, journalists filmed Mr. Gershkovich, his head recently shaved, standing in a glass cage in the courtroom. After several hours, the court scheduled the next hearing in the case for August 13. according to the Russian state news agency Tass.
At the heart of Mr. Gershkovich’s ordeal is a void: the absence of any evidence made public by Russian authorities to support their claim that he was a spy. Nor is it likely to emerge from his trial, which was declared secret, with no observers allowed to attend and his lawyers barred from publicly revealing anything they learned.
“We believe this is a sham trial based on false accusations, and therefore the proceedings will be a farce,” Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour said in an interview. It is impossible to predict how a trial will affect efforts to secure Mr. Gershkovich’s release, he added.
In a statement Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said officials were present at the court and had brief access before the trial began. “We were clear from the beginning: Evan did nothing wrong and should never have been arrested,” he said.
In Russian trials, conviction is largely a foregone conclusion, especially when – as in this case – the Kremlin intervenes. The judge overseeing the case boasted to a local media outlet that in his decades-spanning career he had acquitted only four defendants.
For more than five years, Mr. Gershkovich, an American citizen who grew up in New Jersey, traveled around Russia as a journalist, and came to love the country, his friends say. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly renewed its journalist accreditations.
He may now serve as a Kremlin target for a prisoner exchange, as other imprisoned Americans have recently been. In arranging such an exchange, Russia is emphasizing the need to first conduct a trial, ostensibly placing both sides on equal legal footing.
“He is a Kremlin chip, and they want to trade him,” said Pjotr Sauer, a journalist at The Guardian newspaper and a close friend of Mr Gershkovich.
Mr. Gershkovich’s family released a statement Wednesday saying: “The last 15 months have been extremely painful for Evan and for our family. We miss our son and just want him to come home.
“Evan is a journalist and journalism is not a crime,” the statement added.
In April 2022, Russia negotiated Trevor Reed, an American convicted of assaulting Russian police officers, for a Russian pilot imprisoned for cocaine trafficking in the United States. In the most high-profile recent case, in December 2022, the United States exchanged a notorious arms dealer, Viktor Bout, for Brittney Griner, American basketball star jailed for cannabis possession.
Asked in a television interview in February about Mr. Gershkovich’s fate, Mr. Putin said negotiations were ongoing, but he spoke of seeking further concessions. He suggested he might be willing to exchange the journalist for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian sentenced to life in prison in Germany for the brazen murder of 2019 of a former Chechen separatist fighter in a park in downtown Berlin.
In Moscow, a senior Russian diplomat accused the United States of politicizing the trial. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow had sent “signals” to Washington “through relevant channels” regarding Mr. Gershkovich’s potential release and that they should be taken seriously. serious, according to Interfax, the Russian news agency.
Mr. Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in Yekaterinburg, just east of the Ural Mountains, in March 2023. Prosecutors, in their vague statements about the case, said that “on the instructions of the CIA and “using careful conspiratorial methods,” he was “collecting secret information” about a factory that produces tanks and other weapons.
Mr. Gershkovich was part of a coterie of young Western and Russian journalists based in Moscow. They took their role of explaining Russia to foreigners seriously: constantly working to improve their command of the language, traveling widely, and sharing a traditional weekend cottage in Peredelkino, a hamlet on the outskirts of Moscow known as a retreat for writers.
Mr. Gershkovich, raised by Soviet émigré parents, adopted the name Vanya and relished Russian rituals like saunas and mushroom hunting, as well as sports like soccer and skiing, friends said. His family was not available for comment on the lawsuit, said Ashley Huston, a Journal spokeswoman.
But the climate for journalists in Russia became dire with the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin passed draconian laws limiting how the war could be described and shut down many independent Russian media outlets. Mr. Gershkovich was among many who left the country, but he returned periodically to assess the conflict’s impact on Russia.
Given that no Western correspondent has been charged with espionage since the Soviet era, the prospect of incarceration seems ominous but distant. Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest crossed a red line, Ms. Borzunova said, by making clear that all journalists, not just Russians, were in danger.
“We thought official accreditation meant something, but it doesn’t,” she said.
During his imprisonment, Mr. Gershkovich met with his lawyers and the American ambassador, Lynne Tracey, was allowed to visit him occasionally. The State Department has declared him “unjustly detained”.
His friends took action, launching a letter-writing campaign to keep him connected to the outside world. They organized the herculean task of translating them into Russian, to facilitate their approval by prison censors.
The effort resulted in more than 5,000 letters from around the world, written by people of all ages, from grandmothers to elementary school students. Many people described the difficult experiences they endured, said Financial Times journalist Polina Ivanova.
Mr. Gershkovich’s friends were inspired in part by his consistently high morale. During preliminary hearings, standing in a holding cage for defendants, he usually greeted his fellow journalists with a smile and sometimes held their hands in the shape of a heart.
He retained a sense of humor, suggesting in letters to friends that prison porridge was no worse than some of the meals of his childhood. Mr. Gershkovich, who once held a desk job in the newsroom of The New York Times, was briefly a cook before venturing into journalism. His friends prepare weekly care packages to make up for the lack of fruits and vegetables in Russian prisons, adding candy for his birthday.
He returned the favor by making sure to send them birthday or holiday wishes. He asks his friends to keep him updated on their lives, even encouraging them to send him separate letters describing the same social events. “Like a real journalist, he wants different sources,” Mr. Sauer said.
A voracious reader, Mr. Gershkovich scoured the prison library for some of the thick, seminal tomes of Russian literature, including Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Destiny.” He also reads poetry and works on people behind bars.
The time spent in prison perfected his command of the language. “He had a Russian baby when he came, there was no slang, now it’s lyrical, beautiful,” Mr. Sauer said.
From the moment Mr. Gershkovich was arrested, his friends said they expected a long ordeal, given the experiences of others.
Paul WhelanAn American accused of espionage has been imprisoned since 2018. Marc Fogelan American citizen who taught at the Anglo-American School in Moscow, was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced in 2022 to 14 years in prison. Alsou Kurmashevaeditor-in-chief of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a Russian-American citizen, faces a long sentence on various charges.
“We realized that this was going to be a marathon,” Ms. Borzunova said, “that this was not going to be resolved quickly, that we had to prepare to tell this story for a long time, that he was a hostage of the regime Russian, that he was arrested for his work.”
