In fact, they did. They organized politically. They practiced journalism. They called the war in Ukraine a war, rather than a “special military operation.” Skochilenko, the artist, replaced price tags in a St. Petersburg store with miniature notes containing information on the number of civilian casualties in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city then under siege by Russian forces. All of this is illegal under Russian law. Espionage or high treason, for example, is defined as the gathering of any information — classified or not — for distribution to any foreigners, regardless of whether they work for a government. Any foreign correspondent working in Russia is, by Russia’s definition, engaged in espionage. Any journalist covering the war in Ukraine could be charged with “spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.”
I am one of those journalists. I was recently convicted of this crime in absentia and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The people released on Thursday were arrested under laws specifically created to make it possible to arrest almost anyone — to build a legalistic framework for hostage-taking.
Many states have policies, or at least claim publicly to have policies, of not engaging with these kinds of systems for fear of encouraging further hostage-taking. “A lot of red lines have been crossed,” Grozev acknowledged when I talked with him on the morning of the swap. The Germans, in particular, violated longstanding policies. The British government did not take part in the exchange, even though one of the hostages has a British passport. But as far as the Kremlin is concerned, Washington’s position represents all of the West. Does this mean that all Western countries — their citizens and the hundreds of thousands of Russians living in exile — are now at greater risk?
I asked Joel Simon, director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where I also teach, how to think about this. Simon spent 16 years at the helm of the Committee to Protect Journalists and wrote a book called “We Want to Negotiate.” “Refusing to negotiate or ‘make concessions’ will not cause hostage-taking to disappear and will only lead to the suffering of those held hostage,” he messaged me. “A good deal is the best outcome one can hope for in a really bad situation.”
Grozev is less sanguine. In the long run, he is convinced, the risk to Russian dissidents, those the Kremlin perceives as enemies of the state, and random Westerners who may be within reach of Russia or Belarus is greater now than it was before the swap. “The ability to instrumentalize each arrest in Russia or Belarus” raises the risk of the next round of arrests, he said. The apparent rescue of a Russian assassin and several spies, he explained, delivers on Moscow’s promise to its agents that they can always come home — and that raises the risk of future assassinations.
For Grozev himself, the risk is more specific. The man he had helped put behind bars had been welcomed back to Moscow by Putin himself, with a warm embrace at the bottom of aircraft steps. “I don’t know how I feel about Krasikov being free,” Grozev said. “He stared at me in court.” The moral hazard of this swap may translate into mortal danger for the people who made it possible.
One of the people who made it possible was Aleksei Navalny. If he had not been arrested, Grozev and Pevchikh wouldn’t have concocted Secret Project Silver Lake. If he had not died, the swap would most likely have never happened. Putin would probably never have let him go free. “This should have been such a happy day,” Pevchikh said to me. “But — ” She paused. “This ‘but’ is as big as Earth itself.”
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