Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped

Opinion | Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped. Gershkovich Couldn’t Be Freed Until Navalny Was Dead.

The New York Times  · by M. Gessen · August 2, 2024

M. GESSEN

Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped. Gershkovich Couldn’t Be Freed Until Navalny Was Dead.

Aug. 2, 2024

By

Opinion Columnist

A few days ago, Russian political prisoners started vanishing from their prison colonies: Their lawyers would come to see them only to be told their clients were no longer there. The disappearance of an inmate is often bad news — it can mean a move to a more remote colony, illness or death. But as the number of “missing” prisoners grew, in the Russian dissident community a mounting sense of anticipation replaced the concern. “A trade,” a prominent Russian in exile posted on his Facebook page, without bothering to explain the reference. “Definitely a trade,” posted a young Russian activist in exile, a day later. “I am hopeful and I’m afraid to say the word,” posted another.

On Thursday, Russia released the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, along with 15 other inmates. In exchange, Germany, the United States, Slovenia, Norway and Poland together released a total of eight prisoners, including the Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov. It was the largest and most complicated prisoner swap in U.S. history. It was also the largest such bargain the West has ever struck with Russia, a country whose legal system is designed to punish opponents of the regime and to generate hostages.

The story of this exchange began a year before Gershkovich’s arrest, in late January 2022. Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist living in Vienna, was strolling along Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles with Maria Pevchikh, a leading figure in the anti-corruption movement started by the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.

Grozev, tall and lanky, moves with an awkwardness that suggests a boy who grew too fast. He sometimes forgets his backpack in cafes, and he is peculiarly open for someone in his line of work. Pevchikh, who is a good two heads shorter, is organized, relentlessly logical, suspicious of strangers and careful with her words. The two had first connected after Grozev reached out to Navalny on Twitter. Navalny had survived a poisoning attempt that very nearly took his life. Grozev thought he might have identified the people who had done it.

Christo Grozev in Paris in 2022.

Along with the producer Odessa Rae and the director Daniel Roher, Grozev had recently left Ukraine after offending too many powerful people. Together, the three wanted to travel to Germany, where Navalny was recuperating, to make a movie about him and his failed assassins.

The resulting collaboration, called simply “Navalny,”  contained the single greatest scene in the history of documentary filmmaking, an eight-minute sequence in which Navalny, pretending to be an assistant to the head of the Russian secret police, dials one of his failed assassins and gets an unwitting confession out of him. Grozev and Pevchikh are sitting to either side of Navalny, stifling screams of horror mixed with delight.

Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release.

On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she searched online for “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.

It was around this time that Grozev learned that Russia had sent a squad, or squads, of assassins to kill him. Austrian and American authorities warned him not to return to Vienna, where his wife and two children were. I met Grozev around the same time and played a minor role in helping him get situated. Soon we started meeting every couple of weeks for what I thought would eventually be a profile of him.

James P. Rubin, who was leading a State Department project on Russian disinformation (and who had recently watched “Navalny”), heard about Grozev’s situation and offered a room in his own house.

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