Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped

Compounding Pevchikh’s sense of loss is the fact that three of Navalny’s lawyers and one of his fellow activists who stood trial alongside him — “the only people who had access to Navalny for the last three years of his life,” she said — remain in prison, as do hundreds of others sentenced for journalism, activism and truth-telling. Now that Russia has extracted its agents, the West has less to offer it in exchange for these hostages. Nor is it likely to try, if my conversations with Washington officials involved in this swap are any indication. For them the Russian dissidents were something of an afterthought, an addition forced by Grozev and Pevchikh — and, eventually, by Navalny’s death.

And yet, 16 people have joined the rest of us on this side of the Russian border. Unlike Russia’s spies and assassins, they will never be able to go home again. But at least they can live and speak freely despite the targets on their backs.

M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. Last month they were sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to eight years in prison for “spreading false information.”

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A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 4, 2024, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Navalny’s Death Restored Gershkovich’s Life

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