Evan Gershkovich: A Weird Espionage Story From Russia

Here’s my take on the breaking news of the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Ekaterinburg two days ago, and why I find it strange.

Related post on my YouTube Channel:

According to the Daily Beast:

When contacted for comment by The Daily Beast, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said he was not aware of Gershkovich’s arrest. “If you want, I can check the torture cellar in my house to see if he’s there,” he said. “At first glance, I didn’t see him among the American journalists I keep there by the dozens. I can, if you want, also look at the fresh graves of foreign journalists on my house plot. But if I’m not mistaken, we didn’t bury him there either.”

Gershkovich was brought to a court in Moscow on Thursday afternoon, where the building was evacuated before he was escorted in with his hands cuffed behind his back and a hood over his head, according to the independent outlet MediaZona. Daniil Berman, a lawyer who arrived to represent Gershkovich, said he was blocked from entering and told another lawyer had already been appointed.

As of writing this story, there’s not much information about Gershkovich’s arrest or the events leading up to it, but this is actually not the first time this week he made a splash in the news. The day before, he published a piece in the WSJ titled Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone. The article was previously paywalled, but as of writing this post, it is accessible. I assume that’s due to heightened interest stemming from Gershkovich’s arrest. Honestly, now that I’ve been able to read it, his article is boring and he’s not saying anything new that hasn’t already be said a million times already.

Western news outlets speculate that Gershkovich’s hit piece on the Russian economy was the trigger for his arrest the next day, and that might be true. I don’t think the act of publishing the story itself would be enough to get him arrested. After all, there are still hostile reporters and outlets still operating in Russia, including his former employer The Moscow Times. However, if he published information that is classified and not available to the public, that could very well be the cause for the Russians arresting Gershkovich, and also expressing an interest in finding out who he received this information from. If that’s the case, then it makes sense why the reasons for arresting him were so vague, as to not give away which details from the story were important to national security.

But my personal kneejerk reaction is that the WSJ piece was not the reason for the arrest, and Gershkovich’s personal and professional history offer some clues. From what I’ve gathered, including the bio on his newly-created Wikipedia page, Gershkovich is from a Jewish family that left the Soviet Union in 1979 (Gershkovich himself was born in 1991), and he has worked in Russia for six years. In short, he’s in a very small and highly competitive niche. Simply being a Jewish American in Russia isn’t enough to earn fame and fortune, and it’s a struggle to become and stay relevant.

I ran a Google Trends report for his name, and the results were interesting.

Past 12 months:

Past five years:

Before running these reports, I would have guessed that Gershovich’s arrest would be the biggest dose of publicity in his life, but that’s apparently not the case. Like almost everyone else reporting on a Russia/Ukraine related topic, his biggest break in recent history was the breakout of direct fighting in February/early March, with search queries for his name peaking in May 2022. Since then, he’s struggled to stay relevant.

Unlike his peers reporting from at or near the frontlines in Ukraine, Gershkovich doesn’t have much to work with. Outside from their immediate southern border with Ukraine, there’s really no signs of war anywhere in Russia. Aside from a few patriotic signs and banners, it would be easy to travel around Russia without even realizing there’s a war going on. The only “big scoop” Gershkovich could plausibly find is “smoking gun” evidence that Russia’s economy is crumbling, or that their military industrial complex is inadequate and under-performing. But there’s really no way to find such evidence without digging in places and ways that could potentially get him in trouble. That’s my #1 theory for what got the guy in trouble.

Now here’s the aspect of his story that I find strange. When I first heard of Gershkovich’s arrest, the first and most obvious related story that came to my mind is Paul Whelan, the American former Marine who was sentenced to 16 years in prison back in 2020. Like Gershkovich, Whelan was accused of espionage. Also like Gershkovich, he is, frankly, most likely guilty of sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. Whelan left a family event to go meet another man in a hotel room. Let’s be honest, the only reason a man would meet another man in a hotel room is to have gay sex, or commit espionage. Whelan, apparently, wasn’t meeting for sex, so that leaves espionage. Whelan is by all probability a spy who was serving his country at the time of his arrest. And yet there’s been almost no effort by the American government to get him back.

And American leaders’ apparent lack of interest in retrieving Whelan continues up to the present day. As I said, Whelan is the first and most obvious worthwhile comparison to Gershkovich’s arrest, and yet I haven’t seen a single news article that even makes that comparison. My observation seems to be further reinforced by the Google Trends report for Whelan. Gershkovich’s arrest seems to have caused exactly zero related search traffic about Whelan.

This is particularly astonishing, because, of course, there is already a crowd of journalists crowing for Gershkovich’s release, which might plausibly happen depending on how he’s sentenced and how the Biden administration reacts. You’ll notice from the Trends screenshot above that interest in Whelan spiked in December 2022, due to the heightened news coverage about Britney Griner (see my post about that case here). So far, Gershkovich’s publicity hasn’t even given Whelan that bit of solace. If the Gershkovich drama ends with him being exchanged, like Griner did, that’ll be yet another damning indictment of Biden’s identity politics. A millionaire athlete and a Jewish propagandist are “worth more” than a boring middle class white guy.