In March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich sat in an empty restaurant 900 miles east of Moscow, meeting a source connected to a Russian tank factory. Then masked FSB agents stormed in, blindfolded him, and threw him into an unmarked van. He was charged with espionage and locked inside Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison—a pawn in a geopolitical chess match few could have predicted.
Evan’s story didn’t start there. Five years earlier, he’d arrived in Moscow to build a journalism career, drawn back to the land his parents had fled in the 1970s. He built a life reporting on Russian politics and forging deep friendships—until the war in Ukraine shattered the old rules that once protected Western journalists. Suddenly, he was a target.
What happened next is extraordinary: even locked in a cement cell, Evan kept reporting. For sixteen months, he chronicled Russia’s sprawling prison world—its brutal systems, hidden codes, and startling flashes of humanity—all while awaiting a fate decided by presidents. This Cursed Beautiful Land is his gripping account of the arrest, the imprisonment, and the explosive multi-country swap that finally set him free—a story Patrick Radden Keefe calls “a taut thriller,” and one of the most urgent windows yet into Putin’s Russia.
Evan Gershkovich is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Berlin. Born in New Jersey to Soviet émigrés, he lived in Russia for over five years before his 2023 arrest and subsequent sixteen-month imprisonment on false espionage charges. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Economist and Foreign Policy, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2025 as part of an investigative team for The Journal. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.
Upon the publication of his long-awaited memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land, Evan joins us in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick.