At His Memoir Launch, Evan Gershkovich Recalls Moscow's Thriving Jewish Life Before Ukraine War
The memoir recounts 491 days in Russian custody and the 24-prisoner swap that freed him, with new reporting on the Kremlin’s efforts to frame him.
- On Tuesday, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich published his memoir, 'This Cursed Beautiful Land,' detailing his arrest in Russia on espionage charges and 16-month detention.
- Russian security agents detained Gershkovich in March 2023 while reporting in Yekaterinburg, holding him for 491 days in Lefortovo Prison, a facility that once housed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
- President Joe Biden brokered the complex prisoner exchange involving 24 individuals across seven countries, executed in Ankara, Turkey, marking the largest such swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
- Reflecting on his Jewish heritage, Gershkovich recounts his mother Ella Milman's experiences with Soviet discrimination in the memoir, describing it as a 'captivity memoir' of the broader Russian population.
- Living in Berlin, Gershkovich continues reporting for the Journal while navigating his book tour. He says he feels ready to move forward, though reflecting on his time behind bars remains unavoidable.
11 Articles
11 Articles
At his memoir launch, Evan Gershkovich recalls Moscow's thriving Jewish life before Ukraine war
On Tuesday, the day his new memoir about spending 491 days in Russian captivity hit bookshelves, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich reflected on the country he covered for six years — and on how dramatically life there has changed for Russian Jews since the start of the war in Ukraine. Speaking at the Streicker...
Evan Gershkovich, WSJ reporter jailed by Putin: ‘They didn’t break me as a human being’
‘It would be ridiculous for me, after being arrested, to say that I hate Russians; that would be self-hating,’ says the former correspondent, who has written about his experiences in a new memoir, ‘This Cursed Beautiful Land’
Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother. Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: …
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