This Cursed Beautiful Land: In Conversation with Evan Gershkovich

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, drawing in 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 will present his experience on stage in Germany for the first time. His story spans topics of interest and urgency in both the U.S. and Europe: namely, how has Russia's war in Ukraine 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 politics darkening further and a 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.

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In cooperation with Heinrich Böll Foundation.

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.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schumannstr. 8, 10117 Berlin

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