US journalist Evan Gershkovich spent nearly 500 days in a tiny Russian jail cell. When he was finally set free two years ago as part of an extraordinary multi-country prisoner swap, it took him almost as long to heal.
In an exclusive interview with AFP in Washington on Wednesday, Gershkovich recounted his ordeal after being arrested by Russia's security agency and charged with espionage, a journey he documented in his memoir "This Cursed Beautiful Land," which came out this week.
His release brought a flood of emotions he had kept buried in prison.
"Panic attacks, freezing in crowds of people, quick temper," Gershkovich, 34, said. "I went through prison in this sort of stoic way of thinking I have to keep my emotions in check, but clearly that all got pent up, and so it all started coming out after I got out."
Having not once allowed himself to cry in prison, he now wept regularly and was having nightmares of still being behind bars. There was an even more unsettling feeling: a desire to go back to his prison life, to which he had gotten so used.
"In the initial weeks, I had this really strange pang of wanting to go back. Because it was something I understood," Gershkovich recalled.
The son of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union, Gershkovich grew up in suburban New Jersey speaking Russian with his parents and sister, eating Russian food and going by the Russian equivalent of his name, Vanya, at home.
He arrived in Russia in 2017 eager to get his start in journalism and later worked for AFP in Moscow before moving to the Journal. He remained one of the few journalists who continued to report inside the country after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
He was arrested in March 2023 in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains as he was reporting a story on Russia's military production when a half-dozen security officers from Russia's Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, burst into the restaurant where he was sitting and put him in handcuffs. The source he was meeting turned out to be an FSB agent tasked with entrapping him.
"Immediately it was immense fear, it was sort of like animalistic fear," Gershkovich said.
"They, you know, put the hood back over my head and pummel my midsection," Gershkovich recounted. "I think they were just trying to give me a signal like... 'You're under our control now.'"
Gershkovich says that aside from being roughed up during his arrest, he was not subjected to physical or psychological abuse endured by thousands of other inmates in Russian prisons, including Ukrainians arrested in territories occupied by Russia.
"They chose to not break me as a person, torture me, deprive me of food and hot water," Gershkovich said, adding the agents were clearly aiming for a prisoner swap.
Most of his time behind bars was spent in the notorious Lefortovo high-security prison in Moscow in a cell so small that he could only take six to seven steps. He relied on care packages sent by family and friends, exercised, meditated and kept journals that he later used to write his book. He also read Gulag memoirs.
"I felt like it was almost like a manual," Gershkovich said.
Through his cellmate, Gershkovich learned the rules of Russian prison life, including how to perform various bodily functions in the cramped cell and how to comport himself with other inmates to stay safe.
Both Gershkovich and his employer vehemently denied he was a spy and the US State Department labeled him "wrongfully detained."
In the end, the FSB's case against him was based a document which said, citing an unnamed source, that the Moscow bureau of the Wall Street Journal is used by the CIA to gather intelligence and therefore Gershkovich "belongs to the apparatus of the CIA."
Enraged, Gershkovich yelled at his investigator. "My own editors wouldn't let me publish a scoop based on a single anonymous source, and here you are telling me I'm a spy," he recalls in his book.
In August 2024, after 16 months behind bars, having been convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison, Gershkovich was flown to an airbase outside the US capital, where he was greeted on the tarmac by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
A group of other Russian and German prisoners were also freed, in exchange for Western countries releasing several Russian assets, including convicted murderer Vadim Krasikov.
Gershkovich's recovery took time and psychotherapy. "I'd say it took about the same amount of time as I was in to feel like I'm normal again," Gershkovich said.
Today Gershkovich is based in Berlin and is reporting full-time for the Journal.
He says he will not travel to Russia while Russian President Vladimir Putin is still in power, but he is not ready to close the door on the country.
"In terms of forgiving Russia... what is that, you know? Is it all the 145 million people that live there? Is it Putin and the FSB?" he asked.
"To me, my arrest is the FSB, sanctioned by Putin," he said. "But I would like to go back one day, of course. It meant a lot to me."