In March 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, Evan Gershkovich met with a union boss connected with a Russian tank factory. As the journalist sat with his source in an empty restaurant in an industrial city 900 miles east of Moscow, a squad of masked agents charged in, blindfolded Evan, and dragged him into an unmarked van. The agents were from the FSB, Putin’s powerful security service, and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Five years earlier, Evan had arrived in Moscow to jumpstart his journalism career. His parents had left the Soviet Union in the 1970s, forging a middle-class life in New Jersey, where Evan grew up on Soviet-era cartoons and weekend trips to Brighton Beach. In Moscow, Evan dove into life—unpacking politics for readers of The Moscow Times and developing a circle of deep friendships with Russian peers, all striving to make their way in perilous times. Western journalists had long felt insulated from the dangers their Russian counterparts experienced. But war, it seemed, had changed the rules. Interrogated for hours after his arrest, Evan was told he was being charged with spying and thrown in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison—a pawn in a geopolitical chess match. 

After his world suddenly shrunk to a tiny, cement-walled cell, Evan did something remarkable: he 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.  

Evan will bring us inside the events leading to his arrest, his nearly 500 days in Russian prisons, and the blockbuster, multi-country prisoner swap that freed him.

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Evan Gershkovich was born in 1991 in Princeton, New Jersey, the second child of Jewish immigrants who had fled the Soviet Union for the United States in the late 1970s. After studying philosophy and beginning his journalism career at The New York Times, he moved to Moscow in 2017 to work as a correspondent for The Moscow Times, the French news agency AFP, and, starting in 2022, The Wall Street Journal. In 2023, while on a research trip in Yekaterinburg, he was arrested on charges of alleged espionage and imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. In July 2024, he was sentenced to 16 years in a labor camp and released in August 2024 as part of an international prisoner exchange brokered by the German federal government. Evan Gershkovich lives in Berlin.

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“Propulsive . . . a taut thriller.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 

London Falling

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