Wednesday marked the beginning of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich's trial In Russia. He was detained by Russian authorities nearly 15 months ago and has been held in a Russian jail ever since.
Gershkovich is falsely accused of gathering secret information on behalf of American intelligence agencies, a charge which the State Department and the Wall Street Journal call "ridiculous." Instead, they said the journalist is being used as a political pawn.
David Collings, a professor in the English Department at Bowdoin College was an academic advisor to Gershkovich while he was a student at Bowdoin beginning in 2010. The two have kept in contact since his graduation, so when Gershkovich was arrested in 2023, Collings was shocked. He remembers the larger than life figure he knew on campus.
"I would say he's a very distinctive person. Everybody at Bowdoin who knew him would also speak to this. He was jovial and gregarious. He knew tons of people and he loved hanging out with people, very social. But he was very curious."
His curiosity has persisted even in prison, Collings said, where he is keeping his mind active by reading as much as he can.
"He read War and Peace and a bunch of other immense Russian novels and he was thinking maybe I should write a novel. So he took it as an opportunity to return to intellectual inquiry and literature and to sort of capitalize on his imprisonment in some way that's positive," Collings said.
Though Gershkovich graduated from Bowdoin a decade ago, he is still very much on the minds of current students especially at the Bowdoin Orient, the student-run newspaper where he got his start in journalism. Kristen Kinzler is a senior and the editor in chief of the paper. She said students are watching Gershkovich's case closely.
"I think initially we were all really shocked and horrified [about] what was happening because I think we view it, obviously, as a journalist who's wrongfully imprisoned but also as a member of our community and someone who has written for the same paper and who has been in the same space that we use for production nights and then has gone on to have a really cool journalism career," Kinzler said.
Kinzler said students and faculty have been regularly writing to Gershkovich. The letters, all of which must be translated into Russian, include literature, poetry and messages of support. Last weekend, to mark his 10th college reunion, more than a hundred were sent by his former classmates. Some of them are also taking part in the movement FreeEvanGershkovic.com which advocates for his release. If convicted, he faces 20 years in prison.