This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story

In March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was meeting a source in an industrial city 900 miles east of Moscow when masked FSB agents dragged him into an unmarked van. He wouldn't be free for nearly 500 days. This Cursed Beautiful Land is the memoir he wrote from inside that ordeal — and the story of the country that both produced his family and ultimately imprisoned him.

Two countries, one story

Gershkovich's parents left the Soviet Union in the 1970s for a quiet life in New Jersey; he went back to Moscow to build a journalism career there. That inheritance runs through the whole book: a reporter who grew up on Soviet cartoons and Brighton Beach weekends, interrogated in the same Lefortovo prison his grandparents' generation feared. Rather than stop reporting once he was behind bars, Gershkovich kept documenting — producing an account of Russian prison life most Western readers will never otherwise see.

For readers of

Foreign-correspondent memoirs, contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe coverage, and firsthand accounts of press freedom under authoritarian regimes — this is reportage from inside the story, not after it.