UPDATE: Evan Gershkovich, with other American and Russian political prisoners, was freed on August 1. As someone posted somewhere, we can rejoice that our people are out and the Russians have received murderers and spies in return. The optics of Evan's (and Alsu's) rushed trials to make sure to convict before the trade deal went through are bad... but then, what is good out of Russia these days? Trying not to despair. This good news is something anyway.
Just over five years ago, I found myself with ten days on my hands in Europe. I had taken a group of 20+ students to Hungary and Poland, and I was due to participate in a conference in Croatia. There was a window.
Any normal person would head straight to the beaches of the Dalmatian Coast. Instead, I went to Rome, to John Cabot's Guarini Institute, where we held a panel on the topic of 30 years after 1989 ... and then I went to Russia.
Musing on the former Soviet Union and my time there as a student--especially after watching my own students explore and experience Central Europe--made me want to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak.
Or perhaps that's exactly the wrong metaphor today--as Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, has just been sentenced to sixteen years in a Russian prison colony by a court in Ekaterinburg. I've never been to Ekaterinburg, where he was arrested on a charge of espionage while doing his job as a journalist. Nor have I visited Tomsk. Or Perm. Or Tver. Or Kazan. I've not even been to Leo Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana--and I'm a self-described lit chick.
These are all places I have longed to go--and places I will probably never see. I am persona non grata in Russia, added to a list on March 14 of U.S. citizens who "through their professional endeavors actively harm the interests of the Russian state." See here for my reactions to those personal sanctions. This new status has challenged me intellectually and emotionally--I've spent forty years of my life studying Russia, Russian language, literature, culture, history, and even politics. But the injustice of Evan's sentence--almost sixteen months after his ludicrous arrest--makes my complaints about how my own professional life has changed seem petty and trivial.
When I was in Moscow in 1989, I considered jumping on a train to go visit Yasnaya Polyana. At the time the Soviet law dictated that foreigners could not go outside a radius of 25 kilometers of the city without special permission, and I was a poor student. I knew that "permission" meant a tour, and a tour guide, and an outlay of cash I didn't want to spend. My classmate offered to go with me--to make the pilgrimage to Tolstoy's former home and try to remain under the radar. But much as his Russian had improved in the year we'd been studying, he had a big personality and a strong American accent--we decided that there was no way we could avoid being detected. So we didn't go.
As a foreigner, you stick out in Russia. And I learned that again in 2019. With a valid visa and a week to spare in Europe, I flew to St. Petersburg and spent time with friends and colleagues there and in the countryside. I also took a train (the Lastochka, a fancifully named fast train) to Vyborg, coincidentally on June 12. Both my friend and I had forgotten that this "new" holiday, Russia day, also known as "unity day," meant that there would be more people on the train, and a larger police presence at the station.
We had an experience that we both found utterly weird. As we got off the train, a man in a cheap tan trench coat started to follow us. He approached and asked: "Citizens, what passports do you hold?" My friend responded "Russian. Why?" But the trench coat fellow turned to me: "And Madame?"
He uttered the word, in French no less, with a tone of disdain and irony, as though to say "we both know you're not one of us." He then proceeded to warn us to stay away from the border with Finland. "There will be an increased military presence because of the holiday."
You might say: really? To keep the Finns from joining in with Unity Day? or to keep the Russians from celebrating too near the European Union? What on earth might the reason be for an increased military presence on a national holiday near the border with a foreign country--one that both Russia and the Soviet Union had been known to covet, attack, and occupy over the years?
It was a beautiful if chilly and windy day. My friend and I took a selfie outside an old Soviet bread factory. (For obvious reasons, I'm sharing the photo of the factory, not our selfie.)
I imagine that under different circumstances, this behavior might be considered espionage.
My father--who had been affected by Cold War rhetoric and events and was mortally afraid of the Soviets--used to alleviate his anxiety with a story about what might happen to me in Moscow. "I can just see it now: a train station in Moscow. A guy in a tan trench coat with a clipboard. He calls out: 'One women's volleyball team--CHECK! One mid-level factory manager--CHECK! One American student--CHECK!' And the train pulls away, headed to a Siberian labor camp."
The joke was kind of funny in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods, where there was plenty of nepotism, corruption, and even "thieves in law", but very few guns, drugs, or street crime. And even fewer guys in trench coats on the lookout for Americans. It felt safe to walk around Moscow, Vyborg, and many other cities, and to travel via train, plane or automobile.
Not anymore. I may be banned from going to Russia--but no American should go there. Not with the current state of affairs.
Free Evan. Now.
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