A US-Russian dual national working for Radio Free Europe has been detained in Russia and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, the US-funded news organization reported Wednesday.
Since his arrest on charges of espionage just over a month ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been held in Russia’s most notorious prison, Lefortovo, located in a leafy residential district of Moscow. Its impenetrable walls once muffled the cries of Soviet-era political prisoners tortured and executed by security officers during Stalin’s purges. While bullets no longer fly in Lefortovo’s holding cells, the prison’s central role in Russia’s system of political repression has remained unchanged. “Lefortovo is famous for putting maximum psychological pressure [on inmates],” said Igor Rudnikov, a journalist and ex-local official who spent 10 months in Lefortovo in 2017 and 2018. “The goal is simple: to break the detainee.” Like other prisoners, Gershkovich, a former journalist for The Moscow Times, is likely experiencing extreme isolation in Lefortovo.
My friend and colleague Nick Daniloff has an important op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal about his time in a Soviet prison in 1986, comparing his ordeal to that of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was recently arrested by Vladimir Putin's thugs. At the time of his own arrest, Daniloff was a reporter for…
An American journalist who was expelled from the Soviet Union explains why the arrest of a Wall Street Journal reporter in Moscow bodes ill for relations with the Kremlin.