Evan Gershkovich
Evan Gershkovich · Arts & Literature
Wall Street Journal correspondent in Russia, son of Soviet Jewish emigrants, detained in Yekaterinburg in 2023 and freed in the 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange; author of the memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land (2026)
26 October 1991, United States
Princeton · Moscow · Yekaterinburg
Evan Gershkovich is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Wall Street Journal correspondent in Russia, son of Soviet Jewish emigrants, detained in Yekaterinburg in 2023 and freed in the 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange; author of the memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land (2026)
Origins and early life
Evan Gershkovich was born on 26 October 1991 to Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich, Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union who had reached the United States in 1979, and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, speaking Russian at home. His father's family came from Odesa and his mother's from Leningrad, and a former roommate told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023 that he cared a lot about his identity as a Jew and as the son of Soviet Jewish immigrants.
He graduated from Princeton High School in 2010, where he captained the soccer team, and from Bowdoin College in 2014, where he majored in philosophy and English and wrote for the student papers.
Work and career
He worked for The New York Times from 2016 to 2017, then in Moscow for The Moscow Times until 2020 and for Agence France-Presse until 2022, joining The Wall Street Journal in January 2022 to cover Russia and the war in Ukraine. On 29 March 2023, while on assignment in Yekaterinburg, he was detained by Russia's Federal Security Service and accused of espionage, the first reporter for an American outlet held on that charge in Russia since the Cold War; he, his newspaper and the United States government rejected the accusation.
At Passover that year many Jewish families in America and elsewhere left an empty seat at their seder tables in his honour, and Time magazine named him among the hundred most influential people of 2023. A court in Yekaterinburg sentenced him on 19 July 2024 to sixteen years in prison, and on 1 August 2024 he was freed in the prisoner exchange concluded in Ankara, the largest since the end of the Cold War. In prison a local rabbi sent him matzah, and in September 2026 he published his memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land, which opens with his family's Soviet Jewish exodus.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipedia — Evan Gershkovich; JTA 2023; Forward/J. Weekly 2026; Jerusalem Post 50 Most Influential Jews 2023
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Wall Street Journal correspondent in Russia, son of Soviet Jewish emigrants, detained in Yekaterinburg in 2023 and freed in the 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange; author of the memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land (2026)
Source: Wikipedia — Evan Gershkovich; JTA 2023; Forward/J. Weekly 2026; Jerusalem Post 50 Most Influential Jews 2023
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