(Dobbs) My heart bleeds for Evan Gershkovic
And for the practice of journalism in authoritarian parts of the world. And for the people in the free world who depend on it.
It’s official: Russia has charged Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovic with espionage. More like, Putin has charged him with espionage. When Russia plays hardball, it’s Putin who’s holding the bat.
There are three questions that must be answered about this story which, if it’s even conceivable, has sunk U.S.-Russian relations even deeper. The first question is, could the charge actually be true? Well, anything’s possible, but in this case it’s about as likely as tropical temperatures in wintertime Moscow. Five reasons for that.
First, if there was ever a time when American journalists reporting from Russia would know to err on the side of caution in everything they do, this is that time. When anyone can be arrested for simply (and accurately) referring to Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a “war,” only a fool would commit what Russia says Gershkovic has done, “espionage in the interests of his country.” From his résumé and from his work, the Russian-speaking Gershkovic is no fool.
Second, only a fool would ignore the case last year of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was convicted and sentenced to nine years behind bars for a much lesser offense than espionage, and only was released from prison after the better part of a year when the United States agreed to trade her for a Russian man convicted as an arms dealer and imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Illinois.
Third, from my own experience periodically covering the Soviet Union, then once it changed, Russia, I always knew they were watching and listening to me. If I got in our ABC News car in Moscow to drive somewhere, the colors, letters, and numbers on my license plate identified my profession, my country, and my company, everything but my actual name. I’d come to a traffic light and see a policeman looking at the plate, writing it down, then calling ahead to the next cop at the next corner to say I was heading that way.
One of our staffers once flew to Finland to replace the car with a new one and when she was halfway back to Moscow but making good time, she blew past the exit for the motel she’d booked for the two-day trip. A police car caught up with her and stopped her to say she’d missed her exit. Evan Gershkovic knew all about Russian tracking and surveillance and more.
Fourth, the Russians arrested Gershkovic almost two weeks ago now but so far at least, they have not shown a shred of evidence that he was spying. By all accounts (except that of the Federal Security Bureau, which is the successor to the Soviets’ dreaded KGB), he was doing what journalists do: investigating a story. But the FSB makes it sinister, alleging that he was “trying to obtain secret information” about “the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” Of course in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that alone might be called a crime. Putin himself is a product of the secret police, and suspicion was their default supposition.
And fifth, when a leader attacks a neighboring nation but says that the neighboring nation attacked him, he has lost his last ounce of credibility, if he ever had any. That also goes for the lesser leaders in Russia who fall in lockstep behind Putin and his war whether they believe in it or not because if they don’t, he can break them like a twig.
The second question about the story is, what does it mean now that they’ve charged that Evan Gershkovic is a spy? It means that no foreigner in today’s Russia is safe. It’s an object lesson in how low the threshold of freedom has dropped there, especially for journalists.
I never was permanently based there. I just went in for temporary assignments. But even in that context, I saw how careful citizens had to be about getting on the wrong side of their government, and knew how careful I’d better be as a reporter.
Like the sunny Sunday in the Soviet days when a Russian-speaking American colleague and I were picnicking on the banks of the Moscow River.
We noticed that a man, who had heard us speaking English, slowly and surreptitiously crawled toward us, starting and stopping, looking over his shoulder every few yards. When he finally reached us, he told us in a whisper that he was a firefighter based in a station near the Kremlin and that the fire hoses were frayed but no one was getting them fixed. He considered it important enough to risk arrest by openly conversing with foreigners. And we knew how perilous it was to be with him.
Or like International Human Rights Day one December when we’d gotten a tip that there would be a protest in a small plaza not far from the Kremlin about human rights in the Soviet Union. It was evening rush hour in the middle of a blizzard. When we showed up we didn’t know what to expect, until one woman stepped out of the crowd of commuters waiting for busses and began to place a small bouquet of flowers at the foot of the statue of a beloved Russian poet. But before she could gently lay the flowers all the way down, she was brusquely grabbed from behind. One KGB agent for each arm, a third to grab her legs and carry her struggling form to a waiting paddy wagon. Then came another protesto, this time, a man. Then another, and another. Their crime? The soil around the statue was surrounded by a low-hanging chain and by stepping over the chain to lay down their flowers, they had committed a crime.
Or like the line of about a dozen men who a camera crew and I came across one day while driving through Moscow after the Soviet Union had crumbled. In a silent protest, they had lined up with placards on a sidewalk abutting a dirt parking lot that they’d used for years when they went to work, but were soon to lose to a new government building. They were wary enough to ensure that when we pulled out our camera, they didn’t put so much as a toe on the grass that bordered the sidewalk for fear that they could be arrested for trespassing on government property.
The Soviet Union had crumbled, but its grip was not gone.
The third question about Evan Gershkovic’s espionage charge is, why?
The New York Times editorial board answered the question this way: “Vladimir Putin has drawn on many of the techniques of the Soviet secret police in which he was reared. Once again, people are being arrested and imprisoned not because they committed a crime but because they got in Mr. Putin’s hair, or he needed a hostage, or he wanted to send a signal.” Or, I’d add a fourth option: to get the last of the American correspondents out of Moscow. After Gershkovic was arrested, The Journal’s bureau chief left the country.
Gershkovic is quarantined now in Moscow’s infamous and notoriously isolating Lefortovo Prison, a product of the czarist era, and if the Brittney Griner story is any guide, he’s not likely to leave soon. You might remember that when the United States negotiated to get Griner out, it also tried to win the release of an American businessman, Paul Whelan, who has been imprisoned there since late 2018. But while Griner had been convicted of smuggling a small amount of cannabis oil into the country, Whelan— who’d traveled to Moscow for a wedding— had been convicted of espionage. They let her go. They kept him.
My heart bleeds for Evan Gershkovic. And for the practice of journalism in authoritarian parts of the world. And for the people in the free world who depend on it.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
My heart goes out to Evan. But I just don’t know how anyone would go to Russia? Brittany Griner was a costly fool for the US. Fifty plus years ago I was involved off Kamchatka in documenting Soviet violations of the ABM treaty. Repeated flybys photographing our faces on the bridge of the Gen Vandenburg, plus other shenanigans, was enough to convince one of never ever setting foot inside the Soviet Union.
My amazement stems from the fact that the majority of the Russian people have become so used to that way of life that they seemingly do little to change it. Having "Big Brother" monitoring their every move without revolt goes against the human spirit of self worth.