Washington D.C. – NY Times, Sept. 29, 2026
In an interview, Mr. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was imprisoned in Russia for 16 months, described his ordeal and the moment that nearly broke him.
It took 16 months to get Evan Gershkovich out of a Russian prison. It took many more months to get the Russian prison out of Evan Gershkovich.
In his dreams, he was still in that tiny cell, just barely wide enough for a single human adult to stand and just barely long enough to take six paces. In his waking hours, there were flares of temper, panic attacks, crying jags. The sound of jangling keys was enough to pull him back into incarceration.
He is better now. The nightmares have faded. And for the first time since he was freed in the most elaborate U.S.-Russian prisoner swap since the Cold War, Mr. Gershkovich is ready to publicly talk about his ordeal. About the Russians that he met both in and outside prison. About the country’s slide back into repression. About becoming a pawn in a geopolitical game of intrigue and hostage trading.
“They didn’t break me as a human, which they can do, and they choose who to do that to,” Mr. Gershkovich, 34, his head still shaved as it was in prison, said in an interview. His captors opted against subjecting him to their worst torture techniques, knowing that he had been arrested on trumped-up espionage charges to be a bargaining chip for President Vladimir V. Putin to force the release of a Russian agent held in the West. “The real things I have to deal with are psychological.”
Mr. Gershkovich was a Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in March 2023 when he visited Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, to report a story on Russia’s military industrial capacity as it waged war against its neighbor Ukraine. While he sat in a steakhouse with a local union boss he was interviewing, masked agents from the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor to the K.G.B., swept into the room, grabbed him, shoved him to the floor, handcuffed him and put a black sack over his head.
