Mafia State : How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia

Author: Harding, Luke

Society & social sciences

Published on 1 July 2021 by Guardian Faber Publishing in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 336 pages
129 x 198 x 24 | 274g

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Harding's haunting, brilliant account of the insidious methods used against him by a resurgent Kremlin which led to him becoming the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War. FEATURING A NEW PREFACE FROM THE AUTHOR'A courageous and explosive expose.'ORLANDO FIGES'Luke Harding is one of the best reporters in the world.'ROBERT SAVIANO'An essential read.'NEW STATESMANIn 2007, Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian. Within months, mysterious agents from Russia's Federal Security Service - the successor to the KGB - had broken into his flat. He found himself tailed by men in cheap leather jackets, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the KGB's notorious prison.

The break-in was the beginning of an extraordinary psychological war against the journalist and his family. Vladimir Putin's spies used tactics developed by the KGB and perfected in the 1970s by the Stasi, East Germany's sinister secret police. This clandestine campaign burst into the open in 2011 when the Kremlin expelled Harding from Moscow.

Luke Harding's Mafia State gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller.