Evan Gershkovich has reappeared: with shaved hair, lost weight, with an ironic smile. The Wall Street Journal journalist looked like ectoplasm in the glass cage in which he had to attend the first hearing of the Russian trial against him for espionage. For a few moments the cameras framed him, the photographers admitted to the courtroom took pictures of him, he was far away, he could be seen but not touched, he was sucked into that cage that looks like an aquarium: the public space in which we have become accustomed to seeing opponents by Vladimir Putin. Gershkovich was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, after a year Moscow formalized the espionage charges, a fabricated charge that could lead to an equally fabricated sentence: twenty years. The journalist rejects the accusations, he is not a spy, he was investigating for the Wall Street Journal, not for the CIA, the American intelligence agency. Behind the glass everyone ends up looking alike: Gershkovich, political opponents Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, physicist Oleg Orlov, poet Artem Kamardin, poet Evgenia Berkovich. Alexei Navalny himself resembled all of them: the condition of the prisoner of the regime changes the physiognomy, similar traits emerge, different features made uniform by the glass of the defendants’ aquarium.
Evan Gershkovich has reappeared: with shaved hair, lost weight, with an ironic smile. The Wall Street Journal journalist looked like ectoplasm in the glass cage in which he had to attend the first hearing of the Russian trial against him for espionage. For a few moments the cameras framed him, the photographers admitted to the courtroom took pictures of him, he was far away, he could be seen but not touched, he was sucked into that cage that looks like an aquarium: the public space in which we have become accustomed to seeing opponents by Vladimir Putin. Gershkovich was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, after a year Moscow formalized the espionage charges, a fabricated charge that could lead to an equally fabricated sentence: twenty years. The journalist rejects the accusations, he is not a spy, he was investigating for the Wall Street Journal, not for the CIA, the American intelligence agency. Behind the glass everyone ends up looking alike: Gershkovich, political opponents Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, physicist Oleg Orlov, poet Artem Kamardin, poet Evgenia Berkovich. Alexei Navalny himself resembled all of them: the condition of the prisoner of the regime changes the physiognomy, similar traits emerge, different features made uniform by the glass of the defendants’ aquarium.
The trial against Gershkovich is being held in Yekaterinburg, where it all began, after six years of the journalist working as a correspondent in the country from which his parents had fled. Journalism is a stopwatch to measure the pace of relations between Moscow and the West: when Russia closes itself off, journalists are at risk and relations with Washington are at their lowest. This is the moment now, and it resembles the others that preceded it from Soviet history to today. For Stalin, journalists were either useful to the regime’s propaganda or they were spies. When the Soviet Union opened up a little to those who wanted to tell its story, correspondents could be intimidated, and charges of espionage could lead to expulsion. In 1986, Nicholas Daniloff of US News & World Report magazine was arrested after meeting a Russian acquaintance who gave him a package: he was taken to Lefortovo prison, the prison of spies and macabre legends that even Gershkovich knows about, he was held under arrest for two weeks and finally mistaken for a spy arrested in the United States. At the time, many suspected that his arrest and heavy indictment were a ploy to obtain a prisoner exchange.
Gershkovich ended up in the “hostage bank”, together with the US Marine Paul Whelan arrested in Moscow in 2018 on the same charges as the journalist. This time too, as happened with Daniloff, Moscow is putting aside prisoners to get back someone detained in American or European prisons, like Vadim Krasikov, arrested in Berlin for the murder of a former Chechen fighter in Tiergarten park. The processes are long, the more time passes the greater the pressure. With its policy of prisoners used as bargaining chips, the Kremlin has already achieved results recently: in 2022 the American basketball player Brittney Griner was arrested accused of introducing drugs into Russia, she was exchanged for Viktor Bout, the arms dealer most famous in the world, for years in second place on the list of the most wanted people in the United States. In first place was Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda who organized the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001.
