Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman learned to be careful. Children knew not to repeat what their parents said in their kitchens.
Mikhail recalls his father, who grew up under Stalin, offering a piece of advice: If you’re going to tell a political joke, “make sure there are no witnesses.”
Mikhail and Ella both emigrated to the U.S. in 1979, seeking to escape rising antisemitism and life under Soviet rule. They met in Brooklyn in the 1980s, got married, and raised an American family in suburban New Jersey. Their daughter Danielle took swimming and gymnastics. Their son Evan played soccer. “Here, we can relax,” says Mikhail. “Just find yourself. Decide what you want to do.”
Evan Gershkovich decided he wanted to be a journalist, a calling that took him back to his parents’ homeland. He had grown up speaking Russian, and wanted to use his familiarity with the language and culture to pursue his career. He worked as a reporter for the Moscow Times, Agence France-Presse, and the Wall Street Journal. When Ella worried about him writing articles critical of the Russian government or economy, her son explained that he was an “accredited journalist,” his mother recalls, repeating the phrase as though it were a magic shield.
But it wasn’t. On March 29, 2023, Evan Gershkovich was detained by Russian security forces while meeting a source at a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city about a thousand miles east of Moscow. He has been a political prisoner in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison for nearly a year, the first American journalist to be accused of espionage in Russia since the Cold War.
Gershkovich is not a spy. He has never worked for the U.S. government. The White House calls the charges against him “ridiculous” and classifies Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained.”
“Russia has taken His arrest was a “watershed moment” that represents Russia’s disregard for international norms, Ivanova adds. “It wasn’t that Evan’s work had changed. It was that Russia changed.”
