This Cursed Beautiful Land
A Russian-American Story
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This Cursed Beautiful Land
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Evan Gershkovich
“Propulsive and astutely observed.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, #1 New York Times bestselling author of London Falling
In March 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, Evan Gershkovich met with a union boss connected with a Russian tank factory. As the journalist sat with his source in an empty restaurant in an industrial city 900 miles east of Moscow, a squad of masked agents charged in, blindfolded Evan, and dragged him into an unmarked van. The agents were from the FSB, Putin’s powerful security service, and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
Five years earlier, Evan had arrived in Moscow to jumpstart his journalism career. His parents had left the Soviet Union in the 1970s, forging a middle-class life in New Jersey, where Evan grew up on Soviet-era cartoons and weekend trips to Brighton Beach. In Moscow, Evan dove into life—unpacking politics for readers of The Moscow Times and developing a circle of deep friendships with Russian peers, all striving to make their way in perilous times.
Western journalists had long felt insulated from the dangers their Russian counterparts experienced. But war, it seemed, had changed the rules. Interrogated for hours after his arrest, Evan was told he was being charged with spying and thrown in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison—a pawn in a geopolitical chess match.
After his world suddenly shrunk to a tiny, cement-walled cell, Evan did something remarkable: he continued reporting. For the next sixteen months, he documented a life in Russia that few Westerners will ever experience: its sprawling prison system, with its own vocabulary and customs—and surprising pockets of humanity.
In writing by turns riveting and humorous, Evan brings readers inside the events leading to his arrest, his nearly 500 days in Russian prisons, and the blockbuster, multi-country prisoner swap that freed him. More than a prison memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land is an extraordinary, deeply reported chronicle of a misunderstood people and their land—marked at once by stunning beauty and a haunting history.
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Critic reviews
“Sometimes funny, frequently harrowing, always illuminating, This Cursed Beautiful Land is more than the story of a news reporter who became the news. Gershkovich lives in two worlds at once—American and Russian, observer and protagonist, subject and object—while an autocratic regime tries to reduce him to a trading chip. This book is a testament to the humanity he refused to surrender, and a prison memoir that doubles as a love letter, not to the dictatorship that imprisoned him, but to the Russia underneath: its language, landscape, literature, and people.”—Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See
“Propulsive and astutely observed, This Cursed Beautiful Land is much more than a captivity memoir by a young man who found himself at the center of a geopolitical storm. It is a rousing tribute to the beauty and importance of old-fashioned journalism, a taut thriller of high stakes ‘hostage diplomacy,’ and a poignant meditation on the human struggle between hope and apathy under authoritarian rule.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times-bestselling author of London Falling
“In this memoir that reads like a thriller, Evan Gershkovich brings all his reportorial skills to bear as he chronicles his journey through a Kafka-esque justice system. As a pawn in the new Great Game of prisoner swapping, the journalist became the news. Now Evan tells the private story behind his public ordeal, in vivid detail and with a profound understanding of Russian history and prison’s effect on individual lives.”—Radhika Jones, writer and former editor, Vanity Fair
“Propulsive and astutely observed, This Cursed Beautiful Land is much more than a captivity memoir by a young man who found himself at the center of a geopolitical storm. It is a rousing tribute to the beauty and importance of old-fashioned journalism, a taut thriller of high stakes ‘hostage diplomacy,’ and a poignant meditation on the human struggle between hope and apathy under authoritarian rule.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times-bestselling author of London Falling
“In this memoir that reads like a thriller, Evan Gershkovich brings all his reportorial skills to bear as he chronicles his journey through a Kafka-esque justice system. As a pawn in the new Great Game of prisoner swapping, the journalist became the news. Now Evan tells the private story behind his public ordeal, in vivid detail and with a profound understanding of Russian history and prison’s effect on individual lives.”—Radhika Jones, writer and former editor, Vanity Fair
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