Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich, a Colleague and Friend
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Joshua Yaffa first met Evan Gershkovich after Gershkovich arrived in Moscow as a young reporter in 2017. As their friendship grew, Yaffa was impressed with the energy and passion Gershkovich brought to his job. “He had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia,” Yaffa tells David Remnick. As the regime moved toward authoritarianism and then war, “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working. He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to.” Still, Yaffa says, there was little reason to think a foreign journalist would be targeted by Putin until Gershkovich was arrested in March and charged with espionage—quite obviously a false accusation. It’s the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter for spying since the nineteen-eighties, and a significant escalation of tensions between the countries. Yaffa, who has spoken with Gershkovich’s family, reflects on Gershkovich’s reporting and life in Moscow, and what may lie ahead. “I’ve been sending him letters,” Yaffa says. “I tell him how proud I am of him, of course how worried I am about him—but mainly how impressed I am.”
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| 1:12.6 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:21.6 | Joshua Yoffa has reported from Russia for a decade. He covered the country's tragic slide |
| 1:27.4 | toward dictatorship under Vladimir Putin. |
| 1:30.1 | And recently, Josh filed a piece that was quite unusual for him a very personal story. |
| 1:35.6 | The Russian government arrested a friend of his, Evan Gershkovich, a fellow journalist who |
| 1:40.5 | was reporting for the Wall Street Journal. |
| 1:42.3 | Russia's security agency says it has arrested a U.S. journalist working for the Wall Street Journal in Moscow on charges of... |
| 1:49.0 | The charge against Gershkovich was espionage, quite obviously a false charge. |
| 1:55.0 | For years, Putin has been suppressing Russian journalists, closing down one outlet after another, even as foreign correspondents, |
| 2:01.9 | were still able to report the news freely. |
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