Wearing faded jeans, Gershkovich often met friends and colleagues at Veladora, a Mexican restaurant in central Moscow, and at a kitschy cafe known for having the best cheesecake in the city, which had by now become his second home. In the apartment he shared with Russian roommates, he blared out ’90s Russian rock songs and elicited laughs when he asked to hear niche rock songs from bands like DDT.
In late 2021, Gershkovich later recalled, a colleague found him in a bar applying for a position as a correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. Gershkovich tilted his computer to show him the application form, as if encouraging him to do the same. He was hired in January 2022. A month later, Russia invaded Ukraine and Gershkovich went to the Belarus-Ukrainian border. He was thus the only American reporter to see the first wounded of the Russian forces being carried home. “Writing articles about Russia now also means seeing people you know locked up in prison for years,” he wrote on Twitter in July.
When things change in Russia
His visits to the Moscow sauna mirrored the country’s increasingly somber mood. One day in late 2022, another sauna customer overheard him speaking English and said, “Stop speaking the fucking language.” Gershkovich thought for a minute, then replied in Russian: “This is a multilingual country.” The man stopped, then said again, “But English isn’t one of them.”
Moscow, in his opinion, looked more and more like Russia of the 90s, chaotic and crime-ridden, as the sanctions promoted by the United States limited the sectors of the economy more oriented towards the West. He would spend hours, well into the evening, discussing with colleagues, friends and sources how to tell the story of a country that was at war with its neighbor to the West. “It’s a constant moral crisis. Every article is discussed,” says Polina Ivanova, a correspondent for the Financial Times and a friend of Gershkovich. “Evan was talking about what it meant to deal with Russia rather than Ukraine. It is a very difficult thing to understand and to place in relation to one’s personal identity ». During a report, Gershkovich was followed by several Russian security agents, some of whom filmed his movements with a camera and put pressure on his sources so that they don’t talk to him. He assumed his phone was being monitored. During another trip to the western Pskov region, he was followed and filmed by unidentified men.
On March 29, when Gershkovich went to Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals about 1,500 km east of Moscow, his phone, like that of many correspondents of the Journal, was equipped with a GPS application that allowed his colleagues to follow the movements. Thomas Grove, a Journal reporter who has long followed Russia and now covers Poland, while going out to dinner in Warsaw, noticed that Evan hadn’t sent any messages for several hours. At 7:12, Grove sent a message to one of the Journal’s security officers: “Have you been in touch with Evan?” “I’m working on it”. “The phone’s off.” Grove called an acquaintance of Gershkovich’s to ask him to drive by Gershkovich’s apartment. The windows were dark. While Grove was on the phone, the man turned off the engine and rang the bell. He rang it again. The next morning, a crew of Russian journalists spotted Gershkovich being escorted near the stairwell, his head under his jacket.