A Russian journalist who fled the country in 2020 and was repeatedly interrogated at the notorious prison holding Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich said the psychological pressure of the place makes it a particularly difficult place to endure.
"It's a very unpleasant experience because now he's completely alone," Andrei Soldatov told Fox News Digital on Monday.
Gershkovich, the first American journalist held by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, was arrested last month on espionage charges widely considered dubious. His case has captured the world's attention and the Biden administration has officially designated him "wrongfully detained," which Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour praised Monday as showing commitment to securing his employee's release.
Meanwhile, he languishes in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, the site of many of the executions during the Great Purge under dictator Joseph Stalin.
The rooms there are designed to give the prisoners a sense of total isolation, even from one another. Prisoners in Lefortovo are prevented from seeing the outside world, other than the sky through a small window.
"Psychologically it's very difficult," Soldatov said. "The history of this particular prison, many, many people were killed in the 1930s and 1940s during Stalin's purges, so this kind of thing creates a huge psychological pressure on you, and it doesn't help that Evan was so into Russian culture and Russian history, so maybe it would be better for someone who isn't familiar with it."
Indeed, Gershkovich, whose parents were Soviet Jews who left for the United States in the 1970s, has long had a fascination with the country and embraced Russia's culture as a reporter there. He also speaks fluent Russian. In Lefortovo, he has reportedly received outside messages from supporters and remains in good spirits, but he faces near-certain conviction in a closed-door trial that would result in a decades-long prison sentence.
Soldatov, a thorn in Russia's side for decades with his coverage of its secret services, recounted his experiences being interrogated at the prison for his coverage over the years, beginning in 2002. He said officials tried to catch him admitting he was revealing state secrets, with the method of repeatedly asking him "stupid" questions about his reporting in an effort to provoke him. At one point, he said, his attorney physically pushed him when he almost said something the government could have considered incriminating. He was never physically abused but still called the seven-hour sessions torturous.
"They torture you the way they ask questions… always trying to reformulate what you are telling them. You need to be constantly vigilant," he said.
He left in 2020 after a Russian journalist was accused of treason and it became apparent he was likely next. Soldatov is now on a "wanted" list by Russia's interior ministry and can't return, and his travel is limited for fear of visiting a country that could extradite him to Russia if he was flagged.
Nicholas Daniloff, the U.S. News and World Report journalist who was briefly held by Russia in 1986, also spent time at Lefortovo, which he noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed is used to make an example out of such dissidents as Natan Sharansky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
"I was lined up and photographed outside the prison holding the plastic bag containing the gift my so-called friend had given me," he wrote. "Then I was ushered into a chamber where I was confronted by a KGB interrogator as well as a translator who spoke poor English. Since I speak Russian fluently, I declined the translator. The temptation is to communicate truthfully, quickly and in a way that explains your actions. In retrospect, that was a tactical mistake. Had I refused to speak Russian, I could have slowed and perhaps thwarted the interrogator’s investigation."
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Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Rebekah Koffler weighed in on why Russia targeted Gershkovich.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Koffler said Gershkovich was the "perfect candidate" for the Kremlin because he "checked multiple boxes."
"The Russian intelligence services are always on the lookout for what kind of Americans they can grab. Right. Because it's basically a form of statecraft, hostage diplomacy. This is how they get their high value assets out," Koffler said. "Every single person-businessman, government person, any type of high-visibility personalities are always targeted."
Gershovich's status as a journalist from The Wall Street Journal, Koffler concluded, made him vulnerable to Russians. Moreover, she stressed that Gershovich can speak Russian, meaning "he can get places and he can get to people and he can get topics" that other American journalists cannot, something she suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin would like to stop.
"And he was covering topics that were taboo for Putin... He was covering topics that Putin did not want covered because he contradicted the Russian narrative, the propaganda that was designed to shape the Russian-Ukraine conflict like in a certain way, in a pro-way. And Evan was exposing," Koffler said.
Koffler, the Russian-born author of "Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America," said Putin is hoping that arresting someone like Gershkovich who has deep Russian heritage and knowledge will signal to others that "they will be targeted if they go back on Russian soil" if they are perceived as aiding the U.S.
She viewed Gershkovich's detainment not only as a set-up for an eventual prisoner swap but that there was a "symbolic value" in arresting an American journalist, which goes against free speech principles of the West.
Koffler also saw the espionage charges as done "by design" since such accusations under Russian law "gives them the longest timeframe that he potentially could serve, 20 years" and that it would give Russia leverage over the Biden administration.
"That judicial system is basically designed not to uphold justice but to enable the rulers of the Russian government to do what they need to do to suppress dissent in order to rule indefinitely and to do whatever they want. It has nothing to do with justice," Koffler said.
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As far as who Russia would want in a hypothetical prisoner swap, Koffler said the two on top of Putin's "list" would be Vadim Krasikov and Sergey Cherkasov.
Krasikov, she explained, was a Russian military operative who currently resides in a German prison after he was convicted of the 2019 assassination of a Chechen Georgian field commander. Cherkasov was a deep cover intelligence official who was caught posing as a Brazilian student who gained entry to the U.S. in 2018. He is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence in Brazil for fraud and was recently charged by the U.S. government for illegally operating as a foreign agent.
In the meantime, she hoped Americans realized it was simply unsafe to travel to Russia in the current climate.
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Fox News' Joe Silverstein contributed to this report.
