The trouble with loving Russia: Evan Gershkovich's memoir seeks sentimentality in a lost country

By the end of his pre-trial detention at Moscow's infamous Lefortovo Prison, American journalist Evan Gershkovich had developed a curious rapport with the FSB investigator tasked with proving he was a spy.

"Most people break after four months or so, but you're still holding strong — a year in," the investigator told him, and the two raised their cigarettes in a toast to "having tried to find common ground."

Gershkovich writes about many such moments in "This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story," his memoir of nearly 500 days in a Russian prison. His ability to capture them without artifice is one of the memoir's most distinctive qualities. It is also where the book becomes most troubling.

Read from Ukraine, these interactions raise a question that extends beyond Gershkovich's captivity: What does it mean to recognize the humanity of people who help uphold — even passively — a system of brutal repression?

Gershkovich was arrested in April 2023 while reporting in Yekaterinburg for the Wall Street Journal on Russia's military-industrial sector. The Federal Security Service (FSB) accused him of espionage, claiming he was collecting information on behalf of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The charges were baseless, and the Russian authorities provided no credible public evidence to substantiate them.

Gershkovich admits that before his arrest, he had felt "protected" and "immune" from the authoritarian system taking shape around him. He had mistaken the relative freedom afforded to a foreign correspondent for security. As with the detentions of Marine veteran Paul Whelan and basketball player Brittney Griner before Gershkovich, the Russian state demonstrated with his arrest its willingness to imprison Americans and turn their freedom into a bargaining chip in international negotiations.

After 16 months in captivity, Gershkovich was released as part of a major international prisoner exchange in the summer of 2024, which also included Russian opposition figures Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. His release came shortly after the conclusion of his sham trial, which saw him sentenced to 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Much of "This Cursed Beautiful Land" details those nearly 500 days of Gershkovich waiting to regain his freedom. He learns the rules of prison conduct from cellmates; he watches momentous events, like the Wagner Mercenary Group's short-lived uprising against the Kremlin in June 2023, on television, frustrated that he cannot cover them as a journalist; he dreams and longs for his loved ones.

The relatively humane treatment he receives from his captors at the onset of his imprisonment confirms the obvious: the international attention given to his case made him a high-value hostage. At the same time, he did not have to live through the terror of being tortured for the circumstances to weigh on him.

This distinction matters. Gershkovich does not claim that his experience represents the Russian prison system as a whole, and he repeatedly refers to himself in the book as a "voyeur" among actual prisoners. He has also used his press tour for the book to draw attention to Ukrainian prisoners, including journalist Viktoria Roshchyna, who died in Russian captivity. Her body was returned to Ukraine in 2025 bearing signs of torture and evidence of mutilation, including the removal of some internal organs.

The contrast between Gershkovich's experience and that of prisoners like Roshchyna is jarring. It also exposes the limits of what the memoir can tell us about the true machinery of the Russian prison system — a system that ensnares not only those in Russia brave enough to speak out against the state, but also Ukrainians terrorized under occupation.

Yet the book is not simply an account of how an American journalist got swept up in the Kremlin's political circus. By detailing interactions with prisoners, security service officers, and prison employees, Gershkovich attempts to understand how the country descended into a state of madness. One of the reasons is that contemporary Russia, in many respects, inherited the Soviet police state — a system where widespread suspicion, political entrapment, and the presumption of guilt were instruments of power.

One of the best examples of this is the cult of personality surrounding Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police and an architect of the Red Terror, a period of state-sanctioned violence from 1918 to 1922 against perceived internal enemies of the Soviet Union. Gershkovich calls Dzerzhinsky an "avatar for the convulsions of modern Russian history," adding that he was "trapped in (Dzerzhinsky's) world, and so was the country."

As if to reinforce his point, in September 2023 — while Gershkovich was still in prison — Russian authorities erected a statue of the secret police chief at the headquarters of Russia's foreign intelligence service. That was more than three decades after the original monument outside the feared KGB headquarters was dismantled amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the memoir's understanding of Russia becomes less convincing when it shifts its attention from the foundations of the country's authoritarianism to interactions with those who operate within it.

Gershkovich repeatedly tries to maintain a semblance of civility with the prison employees who control his life. Some, he notes, even commend his politeness despite the circumstances. Such exchanges suggest that the boundaries between captor and captive are not always expressed through open hostility. They also reveal how ordinary social conventions can survive inside a profoundly abnormal system.

At the same time, these interactions are not inherently compromising. A prisoner's willingness to converse with a guard does not amount to an endorsement of the guard's employer. Under extreme coercion, interpersonal ties can be essential to preserving one's sense of self. Gershkovich's steadiness reflects strength of character, coupled with the curiosity of a good journalist — not political endorsement.

But when kindness is presented alongside state violence, does it help us understand how repression works, or does it offer an emotional refuge from that reality?

Ukrainian writer and filmmaker Oleh Sentsov's account of his own imprisonment between 2014 and 2019 offers a useful comparison. During his hunger strike in a Russian penal colony, Sentsov also recalled moments of civility with his captors. Yet his observations are dry, sardonic, and openly contemptuous not only of the prison system but also of those who uphold it. Even a passing observation about their habits — like their listening to Russian chansons, a genre of music that glamorizes criminals — is part of a broader indictment of Russia's political and social decay.

The point is not that Sentsov was morally superior, or that Gershkovich should have responded to imprisonment by also going on a hunger strike as well. Their experiences and circumstances were radically different — Sentsov took a stand against the occupation of his native Crimea; Gershkovich was a hostage used as a bargaining chip. Rather, Sentsov's account more effectively shows that a system of brutality does not require every person within it to be sadistic — just enough people willing to perform their roles and look away from the violence and senselessness that sustain it.

The Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Stus, who died in a Russian penal colony in 1985, offers another perspective. Declassified KGB records show that he cursed his captors at every opportunity he had, refused to obey basic tasks, and was so defiant that even fellow political prisoners worried that his actions would invoke collective punishment. His unyielding stance came at a great personal cost, but for him, they were the human face of the system that sought to punish him for his pro-Ukrainian stance.

Gershkovich's instinct is different. He tries to understand the people around him, including those implicated in his persecution. That instinct aligns with the work of a journalist, whose task is often to look beyond familiar categories and discover how people understand themselves — no matter how repulsive the truth might be.

This is where the memoir's emotional generosity becomes politically ambiguous. Gershkovich's encounters offer a means to distinguish individual Russians from the state that imprisoned him, preserving a connection to the country of his immigrant family's roots. That distinction is both understandable and important. Russia is not entirely reducible to its government, and Russian culture cannot be understood solely through the crimes committed in its name.

But the state's violence cannot be separated entirely from the society in which it operates. The question is how to distinguish between those who resist, those who are coerced, and those who willingly serve an authoritarian power.

Our introduction to Gershkovich's thoughts on Russia also draws on his fond memories of being raised by post-Soviet immigrants in the U.S. and of getting his footing as a young reporter in his family's homeland. There's an enduring sentimentality throughout the book, which conveys that the traumatic experience of being held hostage for over a year has not completely turned him against Russia. Indeed, he admits that the thought of never returning to Russia in his life, or at least for the foreseeable future, drives him to tears.

Even the title — portraying a country that is both beautiful and cursed — suggests a desire to see Russia in a better light. The idea of a "cursed" country evokes a dreamlike folktale: a curse, after all, can be reversed. But Russia's history, so deeply entwined with the suffering of its own people and the subjugation of its neighbors, resists such narrative neatness. To call Russia a "cursed" land is to risk sentimentalizing it.

Russia occupies an unusually privileged place in the Western cultural imagination. The insistence on its depth, including its literature and supposedly unfathomable soul, is often indistinguishable from the violence that permeates its history.

That romantic tradition can make the recognition of Russian suffering feel like a moral achievement while leaving the suffering inflicted on Russia's neighbors at the margins. It can also turn the enduring popularity of Russian culture into an argument for the country's essential goodness, as though cultural achievement were an argument against condemnation.

Gershkovich's memoir is more thoughtful than that. It is clear that he knows that the state that imprisoned him is dangerous, and he does not confuse his comparatively privileged captivity with the experience of Ukrainian prisoners. His continued attachment to Russia is not, in itself, an apology for its government. But the book enters a cultural tradition in which personal affection can too easily obscure political judgment.