I have known Evan Gershkovich since the summer of 2017, when I received his job application for the Moscow Times, the small independent newspaper where I was chief editor.

Evan was working as an assistant to the public editor at the New York Times. Skyping in from his apartment in New York, he confessed to feeling stuck in an industry that offered beginners little room for growth. At a smaller paper, he said, he hoped to have more opportunities to hone his skills.

I was skeptical. He had little on-the-ground experience in reporting and writing. And while he was the son of Soviet émigrés, he had only a basic understanding of modern Russia. 

The reporting position I was looking to fill would be our only one, and with a presidential election coming up the following year, the pressure to deliver would be huge. Vladimir Putin would run, and of course win, but the Kremlin would stage an elaborate show that could easily fool a rookie.  

Meanwhile, pressure on independent media and civil society was being ratcheted up. The political situation was complicated; nothing could be taken at face value. And it would require a mountain of paperwork to bring a foreigner over to work in Russia. 

It was my deputy editor, Jonathan Brown (now an editor at AFP), who convinced me. It would be easier to teach Evan about Russia, he said, than to teach someone else about journalistic ethics.

That — and the voice in my head reminding me that many years earlier, someone had taken a chance on me — made us give him a shot.

“Very psyched,” Evan wrote in a message before boarding a plane to Moscow. “I have a hankering for pelmeni,” he said, dreaming aloud of Russian meat dumplings.

He didn’t get much time, however, to taste-test the difference between the food of his childhood home in New Jersey and that of our Moscow cafeteria. We immediately sent him, still jetlagged, on assignment to talk to a group of opposition politicians. He returned with a solidly reported piece and a bunch of new contacts.

He quickly learned the ropes, with only the occasional stumble. Once, after he ended a phone conversation with an elderly Russian analyst with a cheerful “Poka! Poka!” (Bye-bye!), we all burst out laughing.

Someone explained that in hierarchical Russia the more formal “do svidaniya” would be more appropriate. He took it with grace.

Truth is: Working with Evan was a joy. In the countless hours we spent together, as he worked through my brutal corrections to his beautiful writing, I don’t remember a single conflict — though he was certainly no pushover.

A photo of Evan Gershkovich taken on July 27, 2021. | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Someone who did not know Evan might think his confidence and social panache came from privilege. The opposite is true. After emigrating to the United States in the late 70s, his parents, with whom he was very close, had started from scratch.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Evan’s drive was about more than just himself. He pined aloud for the status and salary that would come from working for a big publication (don’t we all). But he also wanted to get the story right. 

When we talked over plans for writing and reporting, he listened as attentively as if he were in a huddle before a crucial football match.

A huge fan of the sport, Evan wrote the cover story for our print magazine about the Russian national team ahead of the 2018 World Cup, which Russia hosted that year.

“Aging and Inexperienced: Why Russia is doomed to fail,” the cover’s headline read. The national team then went on to win match after match until it was eliminated in the quarter-finals, proving the pessimists, and Evan, wrong.

“But they were aging and inexperienced!” he’d argue every time we poked fun at him over his botched prediction. 

He’d be only half laughing. He just had to make sure we knew the facts had been on his side.

 * * *

In 2022, when Russia introduced new military censorship laws in the weeks after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of us left the country. Reporting the facts — our job — had become too risky.

But as months passed without any foreign journalists getting arrested for “fake news” or “discrediting the Russian army,” some of us gradually went back. I returned in January 2023. 

Several weeks later, I was having dinner with friends at a Moscow restaurant when someone tapped me on the shoulder like a prankster. It was Evan — his face bright red, his body emitting a cloud of warm steam and dressed in a t-shirt despite the thick layer of snow outside. He’d sprinted to the venue.

I remember our, literally warm, embrace and that surge of joy when you see someone you care about again after a long hiatus, especially one caused by tragedy.

Evan’s dream had come true. He had been hired by the Wall Street Journal in January 2022, and he was brimming with story ideas. Based in London and periodically visiting Moscow for reporting trips, he seemed to have found a way to cover Russia despite the widespread fear and censorship, something I still struggled with.

That night there was no intense goodbye hug. I thought we would be seeing each other again soon.

A week later, a news alert flashed up on my screen.

A journalist had been detained by the FSB in the city of Yekaterinburg.

Another flash: The journalist was American.

Flash: His name was Evan Gershkovich.

Gershkovich is escorted from the Lefortovsky Court building in Moscow in January. | Yuri Kochetov/EFE via EPA

And finally: He was being charged with espionage. 

This was serious: Acquittals are extremely rare in Russia, and I’d never heard of one in an espionage case. 

The next evening I got another notification on my phone, this time from Instagram. Evan had “liked” a comment of mine from years ago on a photo he’d taken during a trip to Dagestan.

For a split second I thought he’d been released. But then I realized: One of his captors must have been scrolling through his social media and accidentally pressed the Like button, right next to where I’d written: “Lovely.”

* * *

The next time I saw Evan, he was in court. 

Against the rules — the press had been instructed to wait at the building entrance — I had snuck past two bored-looking guards up the stairs and into the small courtroom together with his lawyers and two other friends.

A day earlier I’d been at the same courthouse to cover the sentencing of Putin critic Vladimir Kara Murza, who’d been given 25 years for high treason. 

On that occasion, the press had been ushered into a stuffy side room to follow the proceedings on a large screen. This time, I couldn’t let that happen. I had to see Evan in person — and, with most of his friends out of the country for safety reasons, I wanted him to see me: a familiar face. 

He stood in a glass cage guarded by bulky FSB agents dressed entirely in black, their faces covered. When he and I made eye contact, I felt such relief that I instinctively smiled. He smiled back, and for a moment it was just as if we were back in the newsroom. 

Then someone announced in a stern voice that the case would be heard behind closed doors, and we were kicked out.

After the hearing I got a second chance to see him, this time with a throng of press who rushed in to photograph him. Our eyes met again, but this time there was no smile. His look was deadly serious. That was the first time I felt the pang, somewhere in between my stomach and ribs, that I still feel today whenever I see a picture of him or hear his name.

Gershkovich, inside the defendants’ cage before a hearing at the Moscow City Court in June 2023. | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

Prisoners in Lefortovo, the high-security prison where he’s being held, are allowed to receive letters and even some parcels. I did my best to write. During my years reporting in Russia, I had often heard from political prisoners about how they’d seen letters from “outside” as lifelines. But I found it difficult, knowing I wasn’t just writing to Evan but also to his prison censors and perhaps the investigators on his case as well. 

Five months after Evan’s arrest, I was informed by the Russian authorities that after a decade in the country I was no longer welcome. A spokeswoman for the foreign ministry said there were “questions about the real purpose” of my “activities.” It seems every foreign journalist is now a spy until proven innocent. 

I am lucky, Russians and foreigners tell me when they hear I’ve been expelled: I could have been arrested. Have I heard of Evan Gershkovich, that American journalist? 

I can hardly retort that I can no longer mail my handwritten letters to Evan at the post office several hundred meters away from Lefortovo — or go shopping for exotic products to send him to counter the blandness of his life between four walls.

Or that I can no longer do nothing at all while still telling myself that somehow by being in the same city and breathing the same air (the one hour a day he’s allowed outside) I’m there for him.

I’m not: I am in the free, Western world. He sits in a cell.

I brought Evan to Moscow. But now there is nothing I can do to get him out.

* * *

If I were to coach the Evan of 2017 today, I’d tell him to take everything exactly at face value. Understanding today’s Russia no longer requires reading between the lines or years of experience. Just documenting the obvious is enough.

Russia is waging a bloody destructive war on its neighbor, while censoring all information about it at home. Russia’s main opposition leader died in a Russian penal colony on the watch of the Russian authorities, most likely on the orders of a man who has since “won” a sham election with an impossible 87 percent of the vote.

And an American journalist is being held on bogus charges (along with several other Americans and some 680 political prisoners.) 

Evan didn’t have to travel back to Russia. The last time we saw each other he told me he found reporting at a distance easier. Sources were less fearful to speak to him over the phone than in person. 

Gershkovich and U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Marie Tracy, wearing a blue jacket, during a court hearing in April 2023. | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

To be sure, many journalists have a habit of running toward situations that make others look for the exit. But with Evan, I don’t think that’s the entire story.

Speaking from personal experience, going back to a place that your ancestors were forced to flee is a deeply ambiguous undertaking: compelling, sometimes brutal, but also healing, as if on some level you are correcting a historic wrong.

Over the years Evan wrote about all kinds of things, from honeybees to urban beautification. Some of the topics he covered — Covid-19 deaths, dead soldiers returning from Ukraine — were not what the Kremlin wanted the world to hear. But he covered those topics with a fairness, sensitivity and nuance that those who are less dedicated to Russia might lack.  

It’s a recurring motif in Russian history: Despite their loud proclamations of patriotism, the country’s leaders systematically attempt to crush the people who love it most (“attempt,” because Evan has proven unbelievably resilient). 

Evan, I can’t wait for you to tap me on my shoulder again. 

Or maybe I’ll surprise you next time.

And don’t worry, we all know: The facts are on your side.

You can write to Evan by sending a letter to freegershkovich@gmail.com