Gershkovich and the beautiful, cursed land that has fallen into the abyss

Evan Gershkovich had hardly intended to find himself featured in his own book when he began writing "This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story". He had been thinking of writing a book about Russia long before March 2023, when masked men stormed a restaurant in Yekaterinburg to arrest him and take him to prison on charges of espionage, but the Wall Street Journal journalist had not imagined that he himself might become the main character in his own work, not even after 491 days in detention. “I was one of the last correspondents left in Russia; the country was changing drastically, plunging into an autocratic decline. I couldn’t limit myself to daily news and reporting” – there was a bigger story beneath it all. Then came the arrest, imprisonment and release as part of the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War; his project changed, but Gershkovich continued to keep himself at arm’s length: “One of my defence mechanisms is to treat the subject matter as a journalistic exercise, to think in terms of gathering information.” He was thinking about the book even whilst inside Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where he was taken, almost feeling a sense of relief tinged with resignation – in the book he writes: “Lefortovo was something of a contradiction: it was Russia’s most notorious prison, reserved for the highest-profile detainees, both Russian and foreign, yet it also boasted the best conditions of any Russian detention centre. My cell seemed to bear this out.” 

The alternative could have been Matrosskaya Tishina, and he – who knew the Russian prison system well – realised before his arrest that this would have been the most devastating option. Inside his cells – he was moved between more than one – he never stopped thinking about his work; indeed, “about my project. I thought about everything I would read once I was free to complete it; I imagined it as a PhD in Russian history”. He had almost begun writing the book whilst forgetting about himself, about his family history – which lay at the root of his move to Russia – and about his own personal story. Including Evan Gershkovich in the book, the journalist admits, was the hardest part of the work. Thus was born This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, recently published in English (in Italy it will be published by La nave di Teseo), which takes its title from a short story by Yuli Daniel, a Soviet writer who was also a prisoner at Lefortovo.

The journalist could not help but include this in his book; it all begins with a family story, with two parents who left the Soviet Union, and his father’s Odessan identity, which also comes through in the typical black humour that the author weaves throughout the book. “A very difficult part for me was also looking at the mistakes we had made, seeing the signs we had ignored but which pointed to the impending arrest”The Russian history and the history of Russia that Gershkovich portrays and recounts – speaking of his arrival in the country, the democratic regression, the war against Ukraine, and his own arrest – form the true core of the book, because the journalist arrived in Moscow at a time when Vladimir Putin had already set his bulldozer in motion against dissent, annexed Crimea, the opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and far too many others had already been killed, yet it was still believed that something might change, that there was room for optimism: “there was a feeling that it wouldn’t last forever. In the spring of 2017, Alexei Navalny had launched a mass movement centred on corruption as a unifying factor, and, shortly before my transfer, there had been elections in Moscow in which the opposition had won around half the seats. A sense of opportunity was brewing amongst opposition figures and independent journalists.” It all came crashing down shortly afterwards; the definitive wake-up call – which had not come with the start of the war against Ukraine in 2014 – came for Russians with the attempt to poison Navalny in 2020. “I realised I’d arrived just before the collapse.”

It is precisely this collapse that Gershkovich studies, examines and recounts, whilst deepening his connection with the Russian language and culture, which are beginning to feel increasingly familiar to him. “My parents left the Soviet Union whilst still quite young, amidst a climate of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism that triggered a wave of migration by people who, like my mother and father, I don’t think felt exactly persecuted, but were seeking better opportunities. They were happy that I was in Russia, until 2022”, when everything came crashing down. For Putin, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine proceeded with a total bulldozing of the country from within. Everything happened simultaneously; even the information landscape was closing in, but Gershkovich continued to investigate and work, pushing himself as far as he was allowed to go, believing that the press visa with which the Russian government authorised him to work was still a guarantee. An entire chapter of the book is devoted to Russia’s apathy, to the sense of detachment, mental numbness and stagnation in the country. The Russians reacted to the war with a few demonstrations, but these short-lived protests were among the causes of the sense of mistrust and anger that Ukrainians feel towards Russians. “Many of the young people who went out to protest ended up straight on the front line. A young man I met in prison received a sentence that will keep him behind bars for almost as long as he spent on the outside, simply for writing an anti-war slogan in spray paint on a government building. I don’t think a pacifist sentiment was entirely absent in Russia, but I think apathy has prevailed. It’s all very mixed; there are people who support Putin but not the war. People who support both or neither, people who don’t say what they think.” For Gershkovich, Lefortovo became a microcosm of Russia during his months in detention: “I found a lot of confirmation; one of the most interesting things was this kind of context. War and apathy were recurring themes, not only among fellow prisoners but also among the prison guards. One guard told me: ‘I try not to think about it.’ Others would zip their lips shut as if they were zips. There were differing opinions, but what I learnt is that people keep asking themselves what proposal Putin needs in order to stop the war.” Putin is stubborn, says Gershkovich. Putin is also obsessed with revolutions around the world; he fears one in his own country, but looking at Russia today, one wonders whether it is a country capable of revolutions, in a context where, time and again, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to ensure that every sentence was exemplary, even to the point of death: Nemtsov, Navalny and far too many others. Gershkovich responds cautiously, without offering absolution, but uses the title of a book by Alexei Yurchak to explain himself: “Everything seemed to last forever, until it ended”. Even the Soviet Union seemed to last forever. I don’t know if a revolution is the way to change the situation; I don’t know how it would change with Putin’s death. I don’t know if these things can happen in a vacuum, but at this time it is difficult to imagine a Russia ready to reform itself in a global context where the authoritarian axis is consolidating.” Someone has already attempted a coup in Russia, perhaps with little conviction, perhaps with little organisation: Gershkovich was already in Lefortovo when news arrived of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group’s march on Moscow – news that almost drove him to despair at his eagerness to cover it, he who had sent Prigozhin a request for an interview and received the reply: ‘All right, but turn up in Bakhmut (where fierce fighting was taking place to destroy and capture the Ukrainian city) with a body bag; anything can happen here.’ Gershkovich also sent an interview request to Putin, attaching it to the statement regarding his release from prison, but when he looks back today on the two interviews that never took place, his curiosity is most keenly focused on Prigozhin: “Putin is very good at lecturing; Prigozhin was different – he was direct, not very used to dealing with the press. I think I would have conducted a rather personal interview; we both ignored certain signs – we could have talked about that.” There it is: that Odessa humour concealing months of torment, during which his only consolation was knowing that the intention was to exchange him for a Russian prisoner, and it was only by virtue of this guarantee that he was spared the violent treatment meted out to others; yet no one gave him the assurance that this arrangement would last forever. Months in which even following the news was not always a good thing, such as when Navalny’s death led him to realise that the prisoner exchange would be slower than expected, perhaps less successful. Months of advice he would never have thought he’d receive in his lifetime, such as that from a cellmate who told him: “If they send you to a penal colony, make sure you put a bar of soap in a sock and strike out if you see anyone walking towards you.” The cellmate taught Gershkovich how to strike. He learnt the lesson; fortunately, he never needed to use it, but inside Lefortovo he could not be certain of that.