The photograph, framed and in a place of honor, is precious to me. Taken in 2016 outside a Manhattan restaurant, it’s a casual shot of four young people and me, everyone smiling. I was concluding my stint as New York Times public editor, and each of these talented young journalists – plus one more who couldn’t make it to the dinner – had served as my editorial assistant at some point over a four-year period.
Almost eight years later, I’ve kept tabs on them. Two still work at the Times, having climbed the newsroom ladder to become a courts reporter and a book-review editor, respectively. One recently has experienced the joy of his first child’s birth. Another has bought a house, with her husband, after moving to Seattle.
And, tragically, one – Evan Gershkovich, now 32 – is imprisoned in Russia, absurdly charged by the Putin regime with espionage when he was merely doing his job of reporting for the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau. Evan, who was arrested one year ago this month, spends his time in a cell in Lefortovo prison with little human contact and virtually no mobility.
He is the first American journalist to be accused of espionage since the cold war, though Evan certainly is no spy. The Biden administration has called the charges ridiculous.
Journalism is not a crime.
To my knowledge, there’s no immediate prospect for his release. It’s well understood that he is a pawn for Putin, who has suggested that he would swap his freedom for that of a Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, jailed in Germany.
Meanwhile, Evan’s life is ticking by.
The pain I feel, of course, can’t compare to that of his parents, his sister, and his closest friends, or to the hardship this talented, ethical and delightful young journalist has suffered.
That personal cost is enormous, but beyond it lies a larger issue: The cost to the free flow of information from and about Russia and to global press freedom. Those are lofty concepts, but they have a real-world meaning, as two of Evan’s close friends – Guardian reporter Pjotr Sauer and New York Times reporter Anton Troianovski – detailed this week when I talked to each of them by phone.
It’s notable that, although these friendships originated from their working in similar jobs as Moscow-based reporters, neither remains in Russia now.
“When Evan was arrested, it was a huge shock on a personal level and it was also a shock journalistically,” said Troianovski, who now does his Times reporting from a base in Berlin. “We took it as a message that the risks were very serious for on-the-ground reporting there.”
Russia has not been a safe place to be a journalist for many years; Time magazine reported in a recent cover story on Gershkovich that at least 39 members of the media have been murdered in Russia since 1992. But until Evan’s arrest, accredited American journalists felt relatively safe.
No more. As a result of Evan’s arrest – along with other danger signs, such as Vladimir Putin’s severe censorship laws instated the previous year – much of western media has withdrawn from long-established Russia postings.
Sauer told me that he had been able to report on Russia from various locations, including Armenia, Finland and Georgia, but he mourned these necessary limitations.
“There is a way to report on Russia from outside, but nothing compares to on-the-ground reporting,” Sauer said. He felt that difference intensely two weeks ago when thousands of Russian protesters turned out, under heavy police presence, for the funeral of Alexei Navalny. The opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner, who had been Putin’s harshest critic, died in February in a Siberian prison colony.
“There’s that moment where you feel, ‘I want to be there,’” Sauer said. And, of course, covering Russia from the inside, following its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, has been hampered as well.
That hampering is by design. Putin wants his message to dominate, undiluted by western media. Evan, whose parents emigrated from Russia to America in the late 1970s, is a fluent Russian speaker. In a New York Times piece, Troianovski praised Evan’s “commitment to telling Russia’s complex story to the world”, chronicling the roots of Putin’s power and the Russian people who have challenged their country’s move toward authoritarianism.
As Evan’s reporter friends from the Guardian and the New York Times told me this week, it’s crucial not to let him be forgotten as his second year of imprisonment begins. Please keep him in mind, they ask; and I do, too.
Speak his name, wear his image on a pin or button, post about him with a #FreeEvan or #IStandWithEvan hashtag, mention him to your elected officials. For the sake of a fine young man’s life, and for press freedom writ large, the travesty of Evan’s imprisonment must end.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
