During the roughly 15 months he's spent in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison, Evan Gershkovich has devoured Russian classics like “War and Peace,” e-mailed slow-motion chess games with his father in the U.S. and used the hour of exercise he's allowed each day to stay in shape.
Friends who correspond with Mr. Gershkovich describe the Wall Street Journal reporter as positive, strong and rarely discouraged, even as he faces the official wrath of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
“He may have his ups and downs, like anyone else, but he is confident in himself and in his rightness,” said Maria Bolzunova, a Russian journalist and friend of Mr. Gershkovich.
Gershkovich goes on trial on Wednesday and faces up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. State Department strongly deny.
Shortly before the hearing began, journalists photographed a recently shaved Gershkovich standing in a glass cage inside the courtroom. Hours later, the court scheduled the next hearing in the case for August 13, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
At the heart of Mr. Gershkovich's ordeal is the vacuum that Russian authorities have not made public any evidence to support the allegation that he was a spy — an evidence that is unlikely to emerge because his trial in Yekaterinburg is secret, with no spectators allowed to attend and his lawyers barred from publishing any information they have.
“This is a sham trial based on spurious charges, and the trial will be a farce,” Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour said in an interview, adding that it was impossible to predict how the trial would affect efforts to seek Gershkovich's release.
Guilt is almost a given in Russian trials, especially those involving Kremlin interference like this one, and the judge presiding over the case has boasted to local media that he has only acquitted four defendants in his decades on the bench.
A U.S. citizen who grew up in New Jersey, Mr. Gershkovich traveled around Russia as a journalist for more than five years and grew to love the country, friends said. The Foreign Ministry repeatedly reissued his press pass.
Now he, like other recently jailed Americans, may fall prey to a prisoner swap by the Kremlin. Russia has argued that in arranging such an exchange, it must first complete the trial, ostensibly putting the two sides on equal legal footing.
“He's a Kremlin stooge and they want to sell him out,” said Piotr Sauer, a reporter for the Guardian and a close friend of Mr Gershkovich.
In April 2022, Russia traded Trevor Reed, an American convicted of assaulting a Russian police officer, for a Russian pilot imprisoned for cocaine trafficking in the U.S. In the most high-profile recent case, in December 2022, the U.S. traded notorious arms dealer Victor Bout for American basketball player Brittney Greiner, who is imprisoned for marijuana possession.
Asked about Gershkovich's fate in a television interview in February, Putin said negotiations were ongoing but was open to further concessions and suggested he might be open to swap him for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian serving a life sentence in Germany for the brazen killing of a former Chechen separatist fighter in a central Berlin park in 2019.
Putin told foreign news agencies this month that the best way to resolve these issues was through dialogue between their intelligence agencies, and a senior Russian diplomat said the talks were taking place through a dedicated secret channel.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg, a city east of the Ural Mountains. In a vague statement about the case, prosecutors said he was “collecting secret information” about factories that make tanks and other weapons “at the direction of the CIA” and “using meticulous, cryptic methods.”
Gershkovich was part of a Moscow-based group of young Western and Russian journalists who took seriously their role of explaining Russia to outsiders, constantly working on their language skills, traveling extensively and sharing a traditional weekend cottage in Peredelkino, a village outside Moscow known as a writers' retreat.
Raised by parents who defected from the Soviet Union, Mr. Gershkovich went by the name Vanya and enjoyed Russian rituals like saunas and mushroom picking, as well as sports like soccer and skiing, friends said. Mr. Gershkovich's family was not available to comment on the trial, according to Journal spokeswoman Ashley Haston.
But Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created a tough environment for Russian journalists. The Kremlin passed strict laws limiting the depiction of war and shut down many independent Russian media outlets. Gershkovich is one of many journalists who left the country, but returned periodically to gauge how the conflict was changing Russia.
“The possibility of imprisonment, while worrying, seemed unlikely, because no Western correspondent had been charged with espionage since the Soviet era. Bolzunova said it was clear that Gershkovich's arrest had gone too far and put all journalists, not just Russians, at risk.”
“I thought formal recognition would mean something, but it didn't,” she said.
Lefortovo has long been the capital's main holding facility for dissidents and other prominent detainees, where prisoners are subjected to 23 hours of solitary confinement a day, plus one hour of “exercise” time in an equally small, open space.
Mr Gershkovich has access to lawyers and is allowed occasional visits from US Ambassador Lynn Tracy. The State Department has declared him “unlawfully detained”.
His friends launched a letter-writing campaign to connect him with the outside world. They To facilitate approval by the prison censors, they were translated into Russian.
The initiative has generated more than 5,000 letters from all over the world, from grandmothers to schoolchildren, many of whom detailed the difficult experiences they have endured, Financial Times reporter Polina Ivanova said.
Pieter Molthof, from the Netherlands, spoke about the two years he spent in a Nazi prison camp during World War II. The now 99-year-old wrote that he understood what Gershkovich had been through and encouraged him to be strong, noting that Gershkovich had built a great life for himself after his release.
Mr. Gershkovich's friends are impressed in part by his consistently high morale: As he stands in a holding cage during pretrial court hearings, he typically greets his fellow reporters with a smile, sometimes putting his hands together in a heart shape.
He never lost his sense of humor, writing in letters to friends that prison porridge was no worse than the food he ate as a child. Gershkovich, who once worked as an office worker in the editorial department of The New York Times, briefly cooked before becoming a journalist. His friends prepare weekly gifts for him, complete with candy, on his birthday to make up for the lack of fruits and vegetables in Russian prisons.
He returns the favor by sending birthday and holiday greetings and asking friends to keep him updated, sometimes encouraging them to send separate letters about the same social events. “Like a true journalist, he wants different sources of information,” Sauer said.
An avid reader, Gershkovich devoured several thick foundational volumes of Russian literature in the prison library, including Tolstoy's “War and Peace” and Vasily Grossman's “Life and Fate.” He also read poems and works about prisoners. At first, his friends tried to read the same books and even set up a correspondence reading club, but they were never able to keep up, Ivanova said.
His time in prison honed his Russian: “When he came he only spoke babyish Russian, no slang, now he has lyrical, beautiful Russian,” Sauer said.
From the moment Gershkovich was arrested, his friends said they expected a long and difficult time, given what others had been through.
Paul Whelan, an American accused of espionage, has been incarcerated since 2018. Mark Fogel, an American who taught at the Anglo American School in Moscow, was convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony in 2022. Ars Kurmasheva, an editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a dual Russian-American citizen, faces extended prison terms on a range of charges.
“We realized this was going to be a marathon,” Bolzunova said, “and that this wasn't going to be resolved quickly, that we had to be prepared to tell this story for a long time, and that he was a hostage of the Russian regime, held captive for his job.”
Ivan Necheplenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.
