This Cursed Beautiful Land review: Evan Gershkovich's prison memoir

Evan Gershkovich spent a year and a half in Russian prisons — Lefortovo, then Yekaterinburg — before a 2024 prisoner exchange freed him. His memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land, reconstructs the arrest, the jails and the trial with the sharp eye of a reporter who knew he would one day write it all down.

Gershkovich is the Wall Street Journal correspondent whom Russian authorities seized on bogus espionage charges in the early phase of Putin's war in Ukraine. The book's opening section, recounting the sting operation that trapped him after a contact promised information about Russia's military-industrial preparations, is gripping and, as our source review puts it, rather moving.

Born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in the United States, Gershkovich grew up in suburban New Jersey on a diet of Soviet cartoons and "Krylov's fables rather than Aesop's" — betwixt and between two worlds. He entered journalism in his early 20s, working nights as an editorial assistant at the New York Times before becoming a reporter at the Moscow Times. He gravitated to Russia, the review notes, and fell in love with it.

Why did he stay when other reporters fled?

As the Ukraine war began and the Kremlin tightened restrictions, Moscow's foreign-press village emptied out. Some of Gershkovich's Russian colleagues fled; the odd one was arrested. He calculated — wrongly — that Putin's thugs would hesitate before doing to a foreigner what they did cheerily to their own nationals. The review judges this "understandable, a little heroic, a little foolish."

What does prison look like from inside?

The prison sections are deftly written but, the review argues, the narrative tires slightly after the arrest. Gershkovich was in a Russian prison but not of it. He knew all along he was a bargaining chip. "I'm still a voyeur, I wrote in my journal. I have a way out," he records. His teenage cellmate in Central prison in Yekaterinburg faced a darker fate: being sent to fight and die in Bakhmut.

Behind bars, Gershkovich reads, takes up smoking again and watches terrible Russian TV — a highlight being Monastery Kitchen, in which a portly chef dressed as an Orthodox priest inflicts horrid pre-revolutionary cuisine on his friend Oleg. He misses his girlfriend, cooks ingeniously with the tools available and forms a touching bond with his Lefortovo cellmate.

The book delivers fascinating, depressing detail on Russian prison life:

• Communication systems between cells
• Etiquette: never shake hands with a cellmate until you've established they're not in for a sex crime
• Wiping your feet on the rag at the cell door as a sign of respect
• Punitive hierarchies and prisoners who grow more comfortable inside than out

Gershkovich captures the strange kayfabe of his prosecution, tormented by curiosity over who, if anyone, really believes he is a spy. He thinks, weirdly, that Putin actually might. The review invokes Beria's principle — "show me the man, and I'll show you the crime" — as still the basic operating system of post-Soviet justice.

What the memoir cannot do

The book's limitation, the review finds, is structural: his ability to analyse events or report on the glubinka — la Russie profonde — is inhibited by the fact that he is in jail. Åsne Seierstad was reporting all over Russia at the same time for her book Never Say War, anxiously aware of Gershkovich's situation, while he watched the conflict unfold on prison TV.

One passage distills the Russian mindset his cellmate Seryoga embodies. When news of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in a plane accident flashed on the screen — after his abortive march on Moscow had electrified Gershkovich — Seryoga said he had already heard. "'Why didn't you tell me?' I thundered [...] Seryoga shrugged. 'He existed and now he no longer does,' he said. 'I couldn't care less.'"

For readers, the memoir's value lies in that perspective: a documented, first-person record of post-Soviet justice from a witness who always knew he would walk out of it.