The Wall Street Journal reporter who spent 16 months behind bars in Russia has revealed that Vladimir Putin once exploded in a fit of rage while talking about him.
Evan Gershkovich, released in 2024 after a grueling 491 days in custody, writes that he has since uncovered what likely led to his arrest—and Putin’s visceral private reaction when pressed on whether he should have ever been detained as a foreign agent at all.
In an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Gershkovich reveals that Putin slammed a table and yelled that the New Jersey-born reporter was an “idiot” in response to a world leader expressing doubt that Russia could have arrested Gershkovich so easily if he was truly a spy, as Moscow alleged.
“He’s an idiot,” Putin reportedly fumed, banging his fist on a table. “He was much too obvious.”
That was in response to the unnamed world leader asking Putin: If Gershkovich, 34, was working with, say, the CIA, then why was it so easy for the Russian security service, the FSB, to stage a sting against him at a steakhouse in 2023 to supposedly catch him red-handed?
Gershkovich writes that he believes the FSB set him up with specific “evidence” to justify his arrest to Putin, needing the autocrat to personally OK the arrest of an American reporter.
“The FSB could go to Putin and sell him on a story that would lead him to believe I was in fact a spy and give the green light for my arrest at the second meeting,” Gershkovich writes. “Putin, it seems to me, fully bought into this narrative.”
Two weeks later, after an initial meeting he now believes was staged to justify his future arrest, Gershkovich writes that he was sitting in an American-style steakhouse with a source who was relaying information to him about Russia’s arms production for its war with Ukraine.
As he took down notes, Gershkovich says masked agents burst onto the scene—putting a black sack on his head and dragging him to a vehicle, where he was questioned and beaten. They eventually took him to a prison, where he was denied access to attorneys and interrogated as if he were a spy.
“The agents were dragging me, still hooded, up stairs and through hallways, my head and chest bent forward, my shins banging against the stairs,” he writes in an excerpt published by the Journal. “Though disoriented, I knew from years of reporting what usually came next: electrodes attached to various parts of the body, the most sensitive parts targeted if the victim didn’t quickly sign a statement admitting to a crime, real or imaginary.
“A thought gripped me: I’d rather die than experience what they might do to me.”
After forcing him to stand with his head on a wall, bent at the waist, for “what felt like hours,” Gershkovich says that a new line of questioning began. He was asked where he was from, when he moved to Russia, and who he had worked for while there. After rattling off his biography, he writes that the investigator noted there was “not one mistake” in what he’d said.
“I know my own life,” Gershkovich says he replied.
“Your cover story,” the investigator corrected, according to the excerpt.
Gershkovich went on to spend the next 16 months behind bars. He was returned to the U.S. on Aug. 1, 2024, in Ankara, Turkey, as part of a prisoner swap that involved 24 people in total. The swap saw Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan return home, but also included Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin, being released by Germany back to Russia.
Gershkovich’s book, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, will hit bookstores on Sept. 29.
