WASHINGTON, US
Working as a journalist in
Moscow seemed a natural fit for Evan Gershkovich, the son of immigrants from
the Soviet Union who grew up speaking Russian at home in Princeton, N.J.
After he graduated in 2014
from Bowdoin College, one of the country’s most selective schools, however, “it
took me awhile to figure out that journalism was the career for me,” he said in
a 2020 interview on the school’s website.
Now Russia’s Federal Security
Service says the 31-year-old American reporter for The Wall Street Journal has
been arrested
on charges of espionage. The FSB, the country’s top security agency and
successor to the KGB, said Gershkovich was collecting information on an
enterprise of the military-industrial complex.
The Journal denied the
allegations and demanded his release.
Sarah Conly, a retired
philosophy professor at Bowdoin, recalled that Gershkovich was unafraid to
speak up while other students hung back.
“He was lively and outspoken
and not afraid to express his views,” she said in an email. “I have followed
his career with admiration and am horrified at this outcome.”
After college, Gershkovich
worked for an environmental organization in Southeast Asia, then moved to New
York and worked as a cook until joining The New York Times as a clerk on the
foreign desk.
Two years later, excited by
what he’d learned at the Times, he wanted to get reporting experience and found
a slot in 2017 at the Moscow Times, an English-language news site in the
Russian capital.
“When you start reporting in
Russia, you often hear that it will be very hard to get people to talk,” he
said in the Bowdoin interview. “And while that may be true of Russian
officialdom -– though not all of it -– I have found that if you go looking for
the right people, many of them want to tell their stories.
“Of course, some will want
their comments to be from an unnamed source, which means, as a reporter, you
have to make sure you speak to them over encrypted channels and protect their
identities. But they’re out there,” he said.
Gershkovich later moved to the
French news agency Agence France-Presse and then to the Journal.
Friends and colleagues were
shocked by the news and took to social media to describe him as a committed
journalist, dismissing the allegations as bogus and ridiculous.
“Journalism is not a crime,”
they posted.
Henry Foy, the Financial
Times’ European diplomatic correspondent based in Brussels, tweeted: “Evan is
an exemplary foreign correspondent, a brilliant reporter and a wonderful,
kind-hearted friend.”
Joshua Yaffa, a Russia-Ukraine
reporter for The New Yorker, posted: “Evan was not unaware or naïve about the
risks. It’s not like he was in Russia because no one bothered to tell him it
was dangerous. He is a brave, committed, professional journalist who traveled
to Russia to report on stories of import and interest.”
Oliver Carrol, a foreign
correspondent for The Economist, tweeted that he hopes Gershkovich’s bravery
“carries through in these very dark hours. It’s something you wouldn’t wish on
your worst enemy. Let alone Evan, who is one of the nicest guys in journalism.”
Many foreign journalists
pulled out of Russia after the country enacted laws to punish anyone who
discredits Russian forces in Ukraine, and the U.S. State Department has
repeatedly advised all Americans to leave the country.
The new law has left many of
the remaining journalists uncertain about what would be considered crossing the
line. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “those carrying out normal
journalistic activity will obviously keep working, if they have proper
accreditation. There will be no problems with that.”
Russian political analyst
Tatiana Stanovaya tweeted that ”the problem is that the recently updated
legislation and the FSB’s interpretation of espionage today allow for the
imprisonment of anyone who is simply interested in military affairs.”
Gershkovich is the first
American reporter to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since 1986,
when Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News and World Report was arrested by the KGB.
Daniloff was released without charge 20 days later in a swap for an employee of
the Soviet Union’s U.N. mission who was arrested by the FBI, also on spying
charges.
One other American is in
prison on a spying conviction: former Marine and corporate security executive
Paul Whelan, arrested in 2018 on charges the United States and his family say
were trumped-up.
For Whelan’s brother David,
Gershkovich’s arrest is painful.
“Our family is sorry to hear
that another American family will have to experience the same trauma that we
have had to endure for the past 1,553 days,” he said in a statement.
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