The urgent message arrived from a Russian human rights group that aids people caught up in the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.
“Friends, sorry!” the spokeswoman for the group, called OVD-Info, wrote to me and other New York Times colleagues last Thursday. “Does anyone have contacts in the leadership of The Wall Street Journal?”
Less than half an hour had passed since Russia announced the detention of Evan Gershkovich, my friend and a Moscow correspondent for The Journal, on accusations of espionage that The Journal, press advocacy groups and the United States government have firmly rejected.
It’s one of the most brazen attacks on press freedom anywhere in years. He is the American-born son of Soviet Jewish émigrés, a former employee of The New York Times, and now, essentially, a hostage of the Russian state.
His arrest was a moment that crystallized just how far and how fast President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia has morphed into a police state in which no one is safe — not even a journalist officially accredited by Russia’s Foreign Ministry.
But in these last few awful days, I’ve also experienced something else: the outburst of solidarity for Evan by Russians who themselves have struggled to tell their country’s story and make it a better place, often at great cost. The latest instance came on Tuesday, when Russia’s leading independent journalists published an open letter demanding the immediate release “of our colleague Evan Gershkovich.”
We are seeing, I’ve realized, an affirmation of Evan’s commitment to telling Russia’s complex story to the world, chronicling both the roots of Mr. Putin’s power and the people who have challenged their country’s authoritarian swing. It is one I’ve found profoundly moving, having bonded with Evan during our shared four years in Moscow (I left in March 2022) over our common fascination with Russia, which I, too, explored as an American journalist of Russian heritage.
In 2019, working at The Moscow Times in his first job after he arrived from New York, he wrote a story headlined: “Meet the People Working to Help Detained Russian Protesters.” It was about OVD-Info, the group that contacted me so quickly after Evan was detained; its coordinator, Evan wrote in 2019, “has been sleeping for about three hours a night over the past several weeks, while the office has been staffed around the clock.”
This past January, he turned to OVD-Info again in a piece on Russians mourning Ukrainians killed in the war. He noted that “on a blog run by the group, a new post with a picture of a Russian detained for holding a poster saying ‘No to war’ or ‘Peace for the world’ appears nearly every day.”
Now, it is OVD-Info and other Russian rights groups, as well as independent Russian journalists, that are giving voice to Evan’s plight, flipping the equation after so many years of Western journalists working to shine a light on the crackdown on free speech in Russia.
That January article appears in The Journal’s powerful compilation of Evan’s stories on wartime Russia — on the invasion’s supporters and opponents, on life in Moscow, on Mr. Putin himself. It made me reflect on his professional devotion to unflinchingly covering Russia, which is intertwined with the many connections he made to the Russian people.
One of them is Ksenia Mironova, 25, an exiled Russian journalist now living in Riga, Latvia, who met Evan when she was working at TV Rain, the independent Russian television channel forced to leave the country after the start of the war. I don’t know her personally, but I texted her over the weekend to ask her to help me send Evan a letter in jail.
Ms. Mironova’s fiancé, the journalist Ivan Safronov, was arrested on suspicion of treason in 2020; held in Lefortovo, the same, brutally isolating Moscow jail where Evan is now; and sentenced to 22 years in prison, where he remains today. The imprisonment of Mr. Safronov, 32, was widely seen as retribution for his scoops about the country’s military-industrial complex.
After she saw the news of Evan’s arrest — first revealed by independent journalists from Yekaterinburg, the Ural Mountains city where he was detained — Ms. Mironova rushed to a studio to record a special episode of her podcast devoted to the families of Russian political prisoners.
“This video — it’s at the very same place,” she says, describing her “flashbacks” upon seeing videos of Evan being led into the Lefortovo courthouse. “This car that they brought him in — I understand that the car looks exactly like the car that they brought Safronov in.”
Later that day, she got to work on a Google Doc: how to send Evan letters and books, along with a 23-point list of basic items (“earplugs!!!”) that should be included in his first care package.
“I know that this is what I can do to help right now,” she told me on the phone later.
She explained that the earplugs were needed to tune out the frequent loud clicking sound that the wardens made in the Lefortovo corridors when they were escorting prisoners to notify other wardens of their approach. That way, the wardens could ensure that inmates had no chance to interact.
This pattern — of Russians jumping in to help Evan — has played out over and over. MediaZona, an independent media outlet focused on Russia’s criminal justice system, offered minute-by-minute updates on Evan’s arrest in a live-blog on its website. A MediaZona reporter managed to make his way into the court building and filmed Evan being led past a stairwell, his hands cuffed in front of him and an officer’s hand on his back.
On YouTube — the most important medium these days for Russians looking for alternatives to Kremlin propaganda — Russian journalists who themselves had suffered from Mr. Putin’s suppression of press freedom spoke of their shock about Evan’s arrest.
“This will make the picture of Russia foggier still,” said Maksim Kurnikov, a broadcast journalist in exile in Berlin. “Right now, of course, foreign journalists are the main source of information about what is happening on the ground.”
Up until Evan’s arrest, the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown of what remained of independent journalism inside Russia focused on Russian-language publications. It was Russian reporters who were prosecuted under the censorship law that made so much as calling the war a “war,” rather than the Kremlin’s term of a “special military operation,” a criminal offense.
A Siberian journalist, Maria Ponomarenko, was sentenced to six years in prison in February for “the public dissemination of knowingly false information” about the Russian military — in her case for writing about the Russian airstrike on a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
But Western reporters went untouched by the law, and Russia’s Foreign Ministry continued renewing their accreditations.
As a result, after suspending operations in Russia in the weeks after the invasion, some Western news outlets determined that they could accept the risks of reporting in the country, even as Russian journalists stayed away. Evan resumed filing stories from Russia, as did The New York Times’s Valerie Hopkins. Their stories about conditions on the ground in Russia were widely translated and cited by Russian journalists based abroad.
“What makes Western journalists so dangerous to the Russian authorities?” Mr. Kurnikov asked on YouTube. “These are world-renowned media that you can’t ignore.”
Evan knew the risks of reporting in Russia, and I am sure that, like me, he sometimes found himself imagining what it would be like to be arrested on bogus charges.
But Evan saw the ability to operate in Russia as bestowing upon him an important journalistic mission; I could sense that whenever I saw him in the last year — most recently in early January when he visited Berlin.
Evan and some friends stopped by a Russian supermarket down the street, bought a can of salmon roe in the Russian New Year’s tradition, and brought it to my apartment. We also chatted about The Journal, where I spent the first nine years of my career.
Over the weekend, I went on a website used for contacting inmates in Russian prisons to send Evan a letter. I filled out the online form, but the text-message service to confirm my phone number wasn’t working. At a loss, I texted Ms. Mironova.
“I’ll try it on mine,” she wrote, and sent me her number.
It worked.
