He was raised by émigré Soviet parents in New Jersey but returned to work in their native land, only to be trapped in the repressive machinery that they had sought to escape.

The parents of Evan Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal reporter released on Thursday in a far-reaching prisoner exchange with Russia, left the Soviet Union separately in 1979, fleeing antisemitism and a lack of opportunity. Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman met and married in the United States, where they raised Evan and his older sister, Danielle, with a foot in both cultures, teaching them fluent Russian.

In 2017, the younger Mr. Gershkovich moved to Moscow to work for The Moscow Times, a local English-language daily, and worked his way through various news agencies until he joined The Journal as a reporter in January 2022.

He was fulfilling his dream of becoming a foreign correspondent, but he ended up spending his 32nd birthday in Lefortovo, a notorious Moscow prison.

“When I heard the name, it was complete horror,” his mother told The Journal.

The ordeal began on March 29, 2023, when Mr. Gershkovich was detained in Yekaterinburg, just east of the Ural Mountains. Russian prosecutors said in vague statements about the case that “under instructions from the C.I.A.” and “using painstaking conspiratorial methods,” he “was collecting secret information” about a factory that produced tanks and other weapons.

The Journal said he had been trying to interview factory workers as part of his job, noting that the Russian Foreign Ministry had repeatedly renewed his press credentials. Both the United States government and the newspaper called the charges a “sham,” with the arrest widely seen as an effort by the Kremlin to seize an American hostage who could be traded for Russians held in the West.