Evan Gershkovich in Moscow from a photo on his Instagram posted February 4, 2021.
National media short on solutions to a journalist’s wrongful detention
Time magazine’s March 7 cover story, “The Fight to Free Evan Gershkovich,” calls attention to the plight of the young Wall Street Journal reporter detained almost one year ago in the city of Yekaterinburg on suspicions of espionage.
The feature describes frantic efforts to negotiate a prisoner swap with Vladimir Putin, potentially involving a Russian hit man serving a life sentence in Germany. Such exchanges have worked. As recently as December 2022, basketball star Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia for drug possession, won release in return for the freeing of arms dealer Viktor Bout.
All people of good faith want Gershkovich to come home safely as soon as possible. His mistreatment is appalling, to say the least.
Sadly, the issue is not as simple as it looks. Russia’s foreign ministry has urged a European Union diplomat to protest the looming extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, suggesting that a double standard is evident in the cases of Assange and Gershkovich. While Assange is not above criticism, free speech advocates have criticized the unprecedented use of the Espionage Act against someone who only published, but did not illegally procure, information.
Moreover, Time, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources covering Gershkovich and the campaign to free him are not interested in the moral and ethical dimensions of prisoner exchanges where one of the people who get to go home is a wrongfully detained journalist, and the other is a murderer, arms dealer, terrorist, or other criminal.
What nearly all the coverage shares is a lack of historical perspective. Criticism of Putin is oddly muted. Time is uninterested in the question of how we should view Putin and how the regime in Moscow today measures up to those of ages past.
The Crackdown
The Time story notes that Gershkovich, who settled in Russia in 2017 to write for the Moscow Times and became a Wall Street Journal reporter, has never worked for the U.S. government and is not a spy, by any stretch of the imagination.
While Russian authorities may assert that Gershkovich has run afoul of laws adopted after the invasion of Ukraine that limit what people in the media can say and write about the conflict, the grounds for his confinement in the notorious Lefortovo prison are vague.
According to the Time story, the situation is a bit of a legal Catch-22. When someone in Russia faces charges of espionage, little information is available to lawyers, representatives of the defendant’s government, or the defendant himself. In the absence of such information, there is little anyone can do to fight the charges and try to clear his name. Our best bet, if you believe the Time article, is to try to arrange a prisoner swap as in December 2022.
In the case of Gershkovich, this has so far proved impossible. Vladimir Putin told Tucker Carlson last month that he might be open the possibility. But the one prisoner Putin seems interested in bringing home to Russia—Vadim Krasikov, convicted for the murder of a Chechen dissident in Berlin—is serving a life sentence, and the German government is unwilling to make a trade.
Tit for Tat
We all want to bring Gershkovich home safely, the only question is how. The reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have detailed efforts to arrange swaps involving not only Gershkovich but former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and the late Alexei Navalny.
As noted in a Feb. 26 story, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has put out a video claiming that the murder of Navalny took place after Putin became aware of the possibility of a swap: Russia would welcome Krasikov home and two Americans, presumably Gershkovich and Whelan, would go free.
By all accounts, the only reason an exchange has fallen through is Germany’s unwillingness to let Krasikov walk. What these stories and reports shy away from asking is whether a prisoner swap is an appropriate way to resolve such a situation.
Whatever else one might say about the center-left party running the show in Bonn these days, the German government is right, in the case of the murderer Krasikov, to enforce its laws. To expect Bonn to give up a killer—the cold-blooded slayer of a political dissident, no less—on the grounds that doing so will have good consequences in an unrelated situation is legally, morally, and ethically suspect.
Suggesting that the release of Krasikov would be an equal and opposing reaction to the freeing of Gershkovich, or vice versa, posits moral equivalency where none exists. It annuls the objective validity and enforceability of a nation’s laws and makes them contingent on the convenience of the moment.
Worse still, it tells governments and criminals of all types and profiles that abducting someone will give them a bargaining chip, fungible in just about any situation and for any purpose.
No matter that the person they feel emboldened to pluck from society and detain is a journalist, lawyer, politician, humanitarian, or other decent citizen doing his or her job, and the person whose release they seek deserves to stay locked up forever.
Off His Rocker?
Putin should know that the world is watching what he does and not everyone’s historical memory is as short as those of journalists in the mainstream media covering this case. If he does not like sanctions and global disrepute, the burden of distancing himself from some of the worst figures in history, and proving that Russia should not be a pariah, is on him.
To put what Putin has done in perspective, it helps to compare him to another ruler whom posterity has not treated kindly. Many people view Czar Paul I, whose reign lasted from 1796 until his assassination in 1801, as one of the most unstable rulers in all the millennia of Russia’s history. The question of his sanity is so vexing that the eminent historian Hugh Ragsdale made it the subject of a 1988 study, Tsar Paul and the Question of Madness.
Ragsdale paints a portrait of a czar who reveled in scandal and shocked the continent by pushing newspapers to print an article quoting comments in which he challenged Europe’s other heads of state to a duel.
He carried on the project that his mother, Catherine II, had begun of rolling back the small reforms she herself had made in favor of a free and independent press. A decree passed on May 17, 1798, set up censors’ offices in ports to screen printed material coming into Russia. Not satisfied with parsing words and ideas from outside the country, the czar passed a further decree on April 18, 1800, imposing an outright ban on books and music from foreign shores.
Knowing that freedom of expression and freedom of thought are inseparable, Paul I even went so far as to forbid the use of words that had become prominent during the French Revolution, such as grazhdanin, the Russian term for “citizen,” and obshchestvo, for “society,” Ragsdale relates.
Not all these constrictions of freedom survived the reign of Paul’s successor, Alexander I, but the damage was done. “The management of information has long since become a traditional function of absolutist governments in Europe,” writes Ragsdale.
Sound crazy? Perhaps, but Ragsdale seeks to a capture a historical figure in all his complexity, not to present a cartoon caricature. Much of what we learn in the pages of his account suggests that Paul I was less insane than many rulers.
While other heads of state beat the drums for war against revolutionary France, Paul I declined to send a force that Catherine had promised to dispatch to help England and Austria, and tried hard to act as a mediator in the conflict tearing apart the continent. He stood up to French aggression though diplomatic channels and even voiced regret for the splintering of Poland, showing a respect for the autonomy of a sovereign state not so much in evidence among more recent Russian rulers.
When Napoleon made an offer in the summer of 1800 to return Russian prisoners France had taken the year before, in addition to giving Paul I the island of Malta, the czar wisely declined, Ragsdale recounts. He was not big on prisoner exchanges, or the handing over of incarcerated persons in return for favors and goodwill. Instead, the czar continued to press for peace among the warring powers. But what really stand out are his concessions to freedom of expression.
No matter how erratic his commitment to a free media, Paul I released from prison the journalist and writer Alexander Radishchev, who had supported both the French and American Revolutions, and the publisher Nikolay Novikov, a frequent critic of the government. The czar also freed the Polish revolutionary hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
What all this points to is that a ruler renowned for his mania and abuses of power behaved, in some ways, more rationally than Vladimir Putin. Paul I did not violate the autonomy of other states whenever the opportunity presented itself, even if—as in the case of Napoleonic France—a case existed for going to war. Evan Gershkovich would have been relatively fortunate to live and work during the reign of Paul I, who let journalists out of prison.
Wherever we come down on the question of whether Paul I was mad, it is sobering to think that in both foreign and domestic policy, he sometimes behaved with more decency than Russian heads of state of more recent times.
We must ask what it means when Vladimir Putin behaves more erratically and exercises more despotic power than one of the most controversial figures in history. Better yet: ask Putin himself. The conversation would be thought-provoking and, who knows, might lead to a journalist’s long-awaited release.
