UNCLE VANYA
Voices on Peace & War
Anton Chekhov, one of the greatest playwrights of the nineteenth century, explored the degeneration of the Russian intelligentsia in one of his most important plays, Uncle Vanya. The titular Ivan Voynitsky (Uncle Vanya) exists in a world of wealthy yet petty parasites, not interested in anyone but themselves. Uncle Vanya is unhappily adaptive, bending under circumstances and living aimlessly.
Journalist Evan Gershkovich, the American son of Soviet-born Jewish exiles who landed in New Jersey, was arrested on March 30, 2023 by the FSB (Russian secret police) on charges of espionage. Gershkovich’s nickname was Vanya, but ironically, he is everything Ivan Voynitsky was not. According to friends and colleagues of Vanya-Evan, he is not a vulgar egoist, wasting his life on pointless work, but rather an extremely motivated, successful reporter, completely enamored with journalism. He is also a wonderful friend. “My three-year-old daughter was crazy about him: when Vanya came to visit, she played only with him, kissed him and murmured “My Uncle Vanya! My Uncle Vanya!!” recalls Andrew Roth, Russia correspondent at The Guardian, and a close friend of Evan.
Gershkovich was hired by the Wall Street Journal in January 2022, where he managed to break a number of important stories in his short tenure. One was a profound, long read on mortality rates from Covid-19 throughout Russia, and how regional authorities tried to underreport. Another was written as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine. Evan traveled to the Belarus-Ukraine border and was the only American reporter to see the first Russian casualties being taken back home.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it was during Gershkovich’s second trip to the Urals in a month that he was arrested. His smartphone was equipped with a GPS tracking app that enabled his WSJ colleagues to track his movements. The last time the Journal staff heard from him was Wednesday, March 29, around 4 p.m. local time, when he was dining in Yekaterinburg. An FSB Special Forces team member escorted Vanya – head swaddled in a hood – from the steakhouse, with a hard-knuckled, gloved hand around Gershkovich’s stooped neck.
At 10:35 a.m. Thursday morning Moscow time, Russia’s state news agency announced that Gershkovich had been “detained and accused of espionage” by the FSB. It was the first time Russia had brought a spy case against a Western reporter since 1986, when the KGB (predecessor of the FSB) arrested U.S. News & World Report journalist Nicholas S. Daniloff on similar charges. Daniloff was detained for three weeks, then expelled from the country in exchange for an accused Soviet spy recently arrested by the Americans, plus Soviet release of political prisoner Yuri Orlov.
“I heard about Evan's arrest early Thursday morning, when one of my friends and colleagues working in Moscow called me to ask if I'd heard anything, just as the first reports on Telegram came through. It was a huge shock. And with every new alert, the situation got worse and worse,” said Francesca Ebel, Russia correspondent at the Washington Post and also one of Gershkovich friends. “It's hard to put into words the feeling that you are absolutely powerless to help one of your friends. That they will be totally alone, going through one of the most frightening experiences of their life, and you can't reach them. I am thinking about him constantly”.
On one of Evan’s last assignments, he was followed by the FSB surveillance detail, which acted with deliberate clumsiness. Sources were pressured not to speak with him, and his movements were openly recorded on video. Gershkovich was followed and filmed again by plain-clothes security agents on another trip, to Pskov, where one of his local contacts was the prominent opposition politician Lev Schlosberg, who openly opposes the invasion of Ukraine, and himself is under constant pressure from the Kremlin.
“It's not clear why the Kremlin chose Evan, aside from the fact that this arrest follows a new pattern of the Russian government taking US citizens hostage as leverage,” says Francesca Ebel. “This case is clearly more broadly connected to the Kremlin's crackdown on media and civil society – it was only a matter of time before they extended their intimidation of Russian journalists to foreign correspondents. It has been five days since Evan’s arrest and we still have not heard or seen anything from him, except that one image of him being escorted out of the Moscow courthouse with a hood pushed over his head. I cannot imagine what he is going through right now.”
“The arrest of Vanya on charges of espionage puts everyone in an equally dangerous situation: now we know that it may happen to anyone,” says Andrew Roth. “Somehow Vanya knew perfectly well what it means now – to remain and work in Russia. He often said ‘We still exist,’ realizing that today there is literally only a handful of full-time accredited foreign correspondents – no more than two dozen for the whole Russia – and he was one of them. ‘I can do it,’ he told us numerous times. Somehow it was really important for him to understand why the Russians behaved that way, why there was so much support in Russian society for a war against Ukraine.”
Vanya-Evan was described by many of his colleagues as a “rapidly progressing professional.” They noted his enthusiasm, and his skill at networking and making contacts quickly. Other journalists admired Gershkovich’s unique and deep understanding of Russia, which few other foreign correspondents had. This was partly due to his background. Evan is the child of Soviet-born Jewish emigres. His mother was just 22 when she fled the anti-Semitic Soviet Union with her own mother, a Ukrainian nurse and Holocaust survivor. Evan’s father, Mikhail, also left the USSR as part of the Jewish migration wave.
Evan grew up in New Jersey in a Russian-speaking home, went to public high school in Princeton, then to a liberal-arts college in Maine, and finally moved to New York where he worked as an assistant in the New York Times headquarters. In 2017 he arrived in Russia where he joined the Moscow Times, an English-language paper, for which numerous prominent journalists like Thomas de Waal reported in the 1990s. Moscow Times served as a training ground for countless young journalists and has remained very popular among Western expats. Gershkovich later moved to the Agence France-Presse, to be picked up in January 2022 by the Wall Street Journal.
“Evan knew that he had a sort of ‘privilege’ because he was one of the few that was accredited and had a visa to work as a foreign journalist after the invasion, and he took that responsibility very seriously,” says Francesca Ebel. “He was determined to go back to Moscow after the invasion, despite the risks – which he knew well – because he believed in the importance of covering the flipside of this war.”
He is also a happy man. His colleagues described him as the “most charismatic person in a room”, always laughing and making jokes. His opposite is Vladimir Putin, a selfish, vulgar, devastated soul; a Chekhovian character saturated with luxury but disappointed in life, who does not believe in joy in this life. I remember how in mid-2021 Putin suddenly made a notable statement that, in his opinion, “there is no happiness at all in life.” This is a radically strong statement for a political leader who at least is supposed to make people’s lives happier and better. Instead, the president of the world’s largest country publicly declares that the world is a bad, unjust, difficult place in which the only way to exist is constantly to wage war.
Most likely Gershkovich realized that Putin and Russian society as a whole – are damaged for life and offended by the world order, which looks unfair to them. Vladimir Putin is really Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya: lost, disappointed in everything, not understanding what’s important in this life. An aimless existence devoid of creativity, beauty and sincerity is the most terrible fate that can befall a person. Such is the modern Russian lot. (“As Uncle Vanya said: “When one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.”)
Putin is selling to Russians the resentment as a formula for life. Resentment is a contagious thing because it’s a convenient emotion. You feel, firstly, right all the time; and, secondly, unjustly trampled. Then blind revenge becomes life’s meaning and only desire. This is how innocent casualties like Gershkovich emerge. In the clash of the Chekhovian Uncle Vanya and the American Vanya-Evan, the conflict between Russia and the West is clearly reflected.
Gershkovich is being held at the FSB’s infamous Lefortovo prison, where Russia traditionally held most suspects in espionage cases, along with political prisoners and dissidents such as Pavel Litvinov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (Because the KGB routinely confiscated books belonging to political prisoners and housed them in Lefortovo, the prison was reputed to have one of the best libraries in the country.) Gershkovich himself once tweeted that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”
In an exodus accelerated by Evan’s arrest, nearly all Western journalists now have pulled out of Russia. It has become too dangerous for journalism. (I know this from experience, which is why I myself left about a year ago).
My old acquaintance, a KGB veteran who participated in Cold War-era delicate exchanges of dissidents for spies, laughed at the supposed “spy intrigue” of Vanya-Evan. “I have no doubt that they will exchange the American for some of our losers who fell into the hands of the CIA – this is the cost of intelligence! And everyone will be happy! And the American will write a book, and will receive some prize, and later his relatives will sue Hollywood for the script!” Such is the level of cynicism that pervades today’s Russia, still Chekhovian after more than a century.
But let us hope that he is right.
“…Ah, then dear, dear Uncle, we shall see that bright and beautiful life; we shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here; a tender smile – and – we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle Vanya, fervent, passionate faith…”
Anton Chekhov “Uncle Vanya”
Dmitri Beliakov, born in Russia in 1970, is an award-winning photojournalist. In his 28-year career he has covered seven conflicts, including the First and the Second Chechen Wars, the Russian-Georgian conflict of 2008, the war in Syria, and the war in the Donbass area. Among his many professional awards are: the OPC Borovik Award in 2005; First Place in the NPPA Portrait Series Awards in 2010; First Place in the POY Print Feature Story Editing/ Magazine in 2015; and the Amnesty UK Media/Photojournalism Award in 2019. His detailed profile can be found at his personal websites:
http://www.dmitribeliakov.com
https://armenianjournal.com/