This Cursed Beautiful Land review: Evan Gershkovich’s imprisonment in Russia
In This Cursed Beautiful Land, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich gives a compelling account of his arrest, imprisonment and eventual release in a 2024 prisoner exchange. He was detained by Russian authorities during the early phase of Putin’s war in Ukraine after meeting a contact who claimed to have information about Russia’s military-industrial preparations. The espionage charges were false, but Gershkovich spent a year and a half in Lefortovo and Yekaterinburg prisons.
The book also traces his personal connection to Russia. Born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in the United States and raised in suburban New Jersey on Soviet cartoons and Krylov’s fables, he later began reporting at the Moscow Times and fell in love with the country. He describes how the Ukraine war and the Kremlin’s tightening restrictions emptied Moscow’s foreign-correspondent community, yet he continued working despite misjudging the risks.
His prison life is portrayed through small, revealing details: reading, smoking, meditation, improvised cooking, terrible Russian television and a bond with his Lefortovo cellmate. Gershkovich examines the rituals and hierarchies of Russian prisons, as well as the absurdity of a judicial process whose conclusions appear predetermined. His perspective remains limited by his privileged status as a likely bargaining chip, but that tension is central to the book. Even behind bars, he observes the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed march on Moscow and later death, while trying to understand a society where imprisonment, propaganda and political power are treated as ordinary facts of life.
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