Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia
By (Author) Luke Harding
Guardian Faber Publishing
Guardian Faber Publishing
14th September 2021
1st July 2021
Main - Reissue
United Kingdom
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Corruption in politics, government and society
Politics and government
Geopolitics
327.120947
Paperback
336
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 20mm
279g
In 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.
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of Collusion, A Very Expensive Poison, The Snowden Files, Mafia State, and Shadow State, as well as the co-author of WikiLeaks and The Liar (nominated for the Orwell Prize). Two of Harding's books have been made into films: The Fifth Estate and Snowden.