Talks & Entertainment

In March 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich met with a source in an empty restaurant 900 miles east of Moscow. Masked agents charged in, blindfolded Gershkovich, and dragged him into an unmarked van. The agents were from the FSB, Putin’s security service, and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB. Five years earlier, Gershkovich—whose parents had left the Soviet Union in the 1970s for New Jersey—arrived in Moscow to start his journalism career.

Interrogated for hours after his arrest, Gershkovich was charged with spying and thrown in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison—a pawn in a geopolitical chess match. After his world shrunk to a tiny cell, Gershkovich continued reporting. For the next sixteen months, he documented a life in Russia that few Westerners will ever experience: its sprawling prison system, with its own vocabulary and customs—and surprising pockets of humanity.

In This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich recounts the events leading to his arrest, his nearly 500 days in Russian prisons, and the multi-country prisoner swap that freed him. More than a prison memoir, it’s a chronicle of a misunderstood people and their land. Gershkovich will be in conversation with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.