The life and career of WSJ’s Gershkovich

Eliot Brown of The Wall Street Journal writes about the life of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, sentenced last week to 16 years in a Russian prison.

Brown writes, “A soccer star in high school at Princeton’s public schools, Evan studied philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine and then moved to New York after a year in Thailand.

“Evan lived in a rowdy apartment with college friends who he took on bike rides to the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, where he showed off his Russian with waiters, ordering vodka by the boardwalk. After a time working as a line chef, he pushed his way into journalism and landed a job as a news assistant at the New York Times.

“Then in 2017, Evan took a career risk: He left his job at the New York Times and moved to Moscow to work at the Moscow Times, a scrappy English-language outlet that has a history of nurturing talented Russia correspondents.

“He was comfortable in New York, but he felt the pull of Russia—a place he’d visited just once but that fascinated him. He believed his Russian-language skills and knowledge of the culture put him in a unique position to explain Russia to the outside world, his friend and housemate Jeremy Berke said.”

Read more here.