The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, recently visited our colleague, Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, at the Federal Security Service’s toughest prison in Moscow.

Gershkovich was in “good health and remains in good spirits,” the ambassador said, which was the best news from inside the “political prison,” as Russians call the FSB’s investigative pre-trial detention site, Lefortovo.

Friday March 29 marks one whole year that the 32-year-old American reporter has spent behind bars awaiting his trial. On Tuesday, a Russian court extended his detention—for a fifth time—by another three months.

Since the time of Josef Stalin’s mass repressions, Russia’s secret police have broken the spirits of dissidents and foreign spies alike in Lefortovo.

Gershkovich is neither. He is a devoted and hardworking journalist. Even after hundreds of journalists had escaped Russia in the early days of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, Gershkovich continued to report stories on the ground about the true situation with Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s tensions with the United States, and Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.

All these topics took a lot of courage to report. As a professional journalist, he provided the readers with the usual watchdog service; he listened attentively to what authorities said, then went and checked. Collecting information and fact-checking is what journalists do.

Gershkovich is in Lefortovo for his journalistic work. That is a place where courage is really needed.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich appears in a court in Moscow court to appeal against the decision to keep him in a former KGB prison.

A defense lawyer for Paul Whelan, another American prisoner who spent his pre-trial detention at Lefortovo, once told me that every time he visited the prison, he felt physically sick and wanted to crawl in bed and stay under blankets: “Its walls seem to scream of human pain,” the lawyer said.

Personally, I have been feeling increasingly........

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