The Evan Gershkovich I Know

It took some time after I first saw the breaking news alert — that Evan Gershkovich had been detained in Russia — for the horror to sink in.

As more details emerged of my former colleague’s arrest, the more it felt like a bad dream. The Federal Security Service (FSB) had detained him while reporting a story in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg and was now holding him on suspicion of espionage. He is the first Western reporter to face such accusations in Russia since the Cold War.

My memories of Evan keep flitting in and out of my mind, colliding at full velocity with the blunt and devastating fact of the present: that he is now facing charges which can only be described as absurd, and which will likely see him sentenced to up to 20 years behind bars.

I first met Evan in 2019, when I moved to Moscow to join The Moscow Times, where he had already been working since late 2017.

But it wasn't until he and I found ourselves in Riga, Latvia for a month that spring on a visa run gone awry (don’t ask) that I really got to know him.

Over shared meals and drinks around the city, he told me of his upbringing in New Jersey with his parents, who were Jewish exiles from the Soviet Union, and sister. We bantered about the cultural differences between Russia and the United States, our home country.

He carried around a well-worn olive-green backpack whose holes he had darned like his mother taught him to do.

A big fan of soccer, he would patiently explain to me what was happening on the bar’s television as his favorite team, Arsenal, played a match.

He cooked me dinner in his Riga apartment, using the skills he’d picked up in a New York City kitchen where he moonlighted while working as a news assistant for The New York Times.

We had only known each other a few weeks, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by this generosity. Evan didn’t think twice about gestures of kindness.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/04/04/the-evan-gershkovich-i-know-a80692