The thousand days of imprisonment of Jason Rezaian and Evan Gershkovich, in Iran and Russia

Jason Rezaian is an American-Iranian journalist with the Washington Post; he now heads a news desk he set up himself, which has the finest name ever – the ‘Freedom Desk’. He was arrested in Iran and imprisoned from 2014 to 2016, for 544 days, accused of espionage by the regime, and released in a prisoner exchange by the Obama administration. Evan Gershkovich is a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. He was arrested in Russia, imprisoned from 2023 to 2024 – for 491 days – accused of espionage by the regime, and released in a massive prisoner exchange by the Biden Administration and the Berlin Chancellery, then led by Olaf Scholz. Rezaian wrote a book about his detention, "Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison," published in 2019, three years after his release. Gershkovich published his "This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story”, two years after his release – the title, referring to the beautiful and cursed land of Russia, comes from a story by the Soviet writer Yuli Daniel, “who spent time in Lefortovo prison,” writes Gershkovich, “and his poems about that place helped me carry on whilst I was there”. Gershkovich quotes Daniel as writing: “I think that what I have written could have been written by anyone of my generation, with my fate, who loves this beautiful and cursed land as much as I do. I have judged this land, its people and myself at times too harshly and at times too leniently, but who can blame me for that?” Gershkovich adds: “I think I have done the same.”

Rezaian invited Gershkovich onto his Freedom Desk podcast, but theirs is not a conversation between two former prisoners comparing two experiences that clearly have much in common: it is a reflection on their respective homelands and cultures – Iranian for Rezaian, Russian for Gershkovich – on returning there to work after having grown up in America, that is, in a free country, on the pull of a place that recurs in the language spoken at home, in memories, and which is found to be entirely different, distorted; on the risks one is prepared to take and those one is not; on the fact of having become, in some way, famous; of having had the ‘fortune’ – so to speak – of making the front pages of newspapers, of being the subject of conversation amongst world leaders, and even amongst one’s tormentors (Gershkovich recounts some conversations he was told about in which Vladimir Putin claimed to be certain that the journalist was a spy, and his interlocutor pointed out that, for a spy, he hadn’t exactly done a very good job of maintaining his cover, to which the Russian president replied: ‘Of course, he’s an idiot’), because international pressure can be a route to salvation. Gershkovich says, “If you’re a valuable asset”, you have certain thoughts; for example, you know they won’t treat you in the worst possible way – they won’t torture you, for instance – and he cites Victoria Roshchyna, “a Ukrainian journalist taken prisoner by the Russians at the same time as I was: she was tortured and killed; her body was sent home in a black bag and her internal organs were missing, so her family and the Ukrainian government cannot piece together what happened to her’. They imagine it, we imagine it, but this is not what happened to Gershkovich, nor even to Rezaian, who finish their sentences almost in unison: the Russian regime may be unspeakably cruel, but it also knows how to weigh up its options, and the life of an American journalist can be of great value.

With a thousand days of imprisonment between them to get through, Rezaian and Gershkovich describe how one survives: the routine of keeping notes to maintain a sense of time, the luxury of a television when one is available, and the guilt towards relatives back home who are scared out of their wits, unaware that they aren’t being treated all that badly, that you aren’t going mad – whilst they, perhaps, are. It was for his parents that Gershkovich, when he appeared in court, made a heart shape with his hands and smiled: he wasn’t allowed to speak, he’d been told – or at least he could have, but then there would have been punishments – so he decided not to speak but to show himself to be alive and well, offering a hint of a smile that his parents would surely understand.

Gershkovich’s account also features the other prisoners, their stories, the various prisons they had been held in, those who were not even present at the scene of the crime of which they were accused, those convicted because they ‘intended’ to commit a crime, many who had protested against the regime, and others who had opposed the Russian war against Ukraine. There is also Nikita, who is pro-Putin and not particularly pro-war, though not opposed to it, and who wants to enlist as demanded by the Russian regime, which sends convicts to the front, because that way he can get out of prison straight away: Gershkovich tries to dissuade him, telling him, “It’s immoral to go and kill Ukrainians for your own freedom”, but Nikita wants to leave prison; he doesn’t want to wait until the end of his sentence, so he goes – and he will die in the war. Gershkovich also mentions another detail at the end of his book, when he recounts the negotiations for his release and the prisoner exchange: the list of who to release. One person was included, but his sentence was due to end shortly; perhaps it would have been better to include another political prisoner who is still in prison – and many write to him: ‘Help us’ – and the chasm of these lists, of these decisions, of who is saved and who is left behind, of salvation or oblivion, yawns open before us once more, cruel.