• by Ray Schultz , March 7, 2024

Time magazine has taken a stand for journalistic freedom by placing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia since March 29, 2023, on its cover, with the headline: “The Fight to Free Evan Gershkovich.” 

The shock running through the Wall Street Journal newsroom – and indeed, throughout the profession – when Gershkovich was detained “speaks volumes about the unreality of his abduction into the Russian judicial system,” writes Sam Jacobs, editor in chief of Time.

Gershkovich told his parents “not to worry; after all, he was a journalist accredited by the Foreign Ministry,” Jacobs continues. “Gershkovich thought that status would protect him, even as he knew life there had changed. ‘Reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years,’ he wrote on Twitter, now X, in July 2022.” 

Jacobs adds that “Gershkovich saw reporting in Russia as a calling, one made all the more important because the freedom of Russian journalists had been almost entirely curtailed.”

Gershkovich seems to be holding up and hasn’t lost his sense of self or his sense of humor, Jacobs reports. But he has joined the number of people now imprisoned, including fellow American Paul Whelan. And the recent death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian penal colony “only underscored the precarity of their situation.” 

What’s more, it “negated the possibility of a prisoner exchange that could have included all three,” as Charlotte Alter reports in her cover story, Jacobs argues.   

Jacobs concludes, “We join the journalists and their supporters at the Wall Street Journal, as well as our colleagues across our industry, in calling for his release. We look forward to the day when Gershkovich is free, back with his friends and family, back doing the work he loves.”