This Cursed Beautiful Land: In Conversation with Evan Gershkovich

In cooperation with Bard College Berlin and with the support of Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA).

In March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was meeting a source 900 miles east of Moscow when masked FSB agents stormed in, blindfolded him, and took him away. He was charged with espionage and imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. Over the next 16 months in captivity, Gershkovich was both a hostage and pawn in a larger geopolitical conflict between Russia, the U.S., and Europe. All the while, Gershkovich continued reporting, chronicling Russia’s prison system while awaiting a fate decided at the highest levels of government. 

Gershkovich's story spans topics of interest and urgency in both the U.S. and Europe: namely, how has Russia's war in Ukraine forever upended relations between Russia and the West, and how to make sense of a country that has increasingly become a black box? Not to mention how Russia itself has transformed, its repressive apparatus gaining ever more momentum. 

In “This Cursed Beautiful Land”, Gershkovich recounts his arrest, imprisonment, and the historic prisoner exchange that secured his freedom, with an eye toward understanding for himself and explaining to the outside world a country that remains enigmatic. In conversation with Joshua Yaffa, who covered Russia for The New Yorker for many years, he will speak to the many harrowing details and important lessons of his own story for transatlantic audiences.

With:

• Evan Gershkovich is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Born in New Jersey to Soviet émigrés, he lived in Russia for over five years before his 2023 arrest and subsequent sixteen-month imprisonment on false espionage charges. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Economist and Foreign Policy, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2025 as part of an investigative team for The Journal.
• Joshua Yaffa is Writer-in-Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia”, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021.

This event is part of a Bard College Berlin’s and the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s event series, “Writing Democracy: Stories, Ideas, and Arguments On and Off the Page.” The series brings prominent journalists and writers into conversation with a broad audience in Berlin and across Germany to discuss issues of civic and political importance in both Germany and the United States. Through the lens of writing, the series offers a wider exploration of democracy and democratic institutions in a transatlantic context, including politics and society in the U.S. and Europe, the lessons of history, the role of democratic values, and misconceptions on both sides of the Atlantic, all with the aim of strengthening transatlantic ties in a challenging time.

Contact
Deitra Myers
Division European Union and North America, Heinrich Böll Foundation Berlin
E myers@boell.de