Evan Gershkovich says the moment the hood went over his head in a Yekaterinburg steakhouse, one thing was instantly clear: "This wasn't a misunderstanding." In an excerpt from his memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land, the Wall Street Journal reporter—freed in a 2024 prisoner swap after more than a year in Russia's Lefortovo prison—reconstructs his arrest and wrestles with the question in the headline: Did Vladimir Putin really believe he was a spy? Gershkovich describes being lured with documents on tank production, tackled by masked FSB officers, and told he was being charged with espionage. He later learns from investigative journalist Christo Grozev that Russian security services appear to have set up multiple "dangles" to trap him—suggesting his case was engineered more as a political hostage-taking than a standard prosecution.
Yet Gershkovich also recounts Putin insisting to both Tucker Carlson and an unnamed world leader involved in negotiations that Gershkovich had been "caught red-handed," even calling him "an idiot" for being so easy to nab. This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is out Tuesday, is meant as a "captivity memoir," Gershkovich tells the New York Times—both of his own captivity and that of a Russian people caught up in Putin's authoritarianism. "I hope people take away not just something about the resilience of the human spirit, how we adapt in these challenging circumstances," Gershkovich says, "but also how the people are living yet again under this autocratic regime in Russia." The book excerpt also traces how Russia's security state evolved, what his cellmates believed, and why his life "will be completely different now." Read it in the Wall Street Journal.
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