Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia [Hardcover]

After mastering Russian with impressive speed, Luke Harding spent about four years based in Moscow as a foreign correspondent for "The Guardian". Making the most of opportunities to travel which he clearly found fascinating, Harding was more energetic and courageous than many of his colleagues, in reporting on the growth of corruption and undemocratic "vertical power" under Putin, crushing the opportunities opened up by Gorbachev's "perestroika". He describes unflinchingly how former KGB agents (siloviki) have gained key positions in the Kremlin, with the recently formed FSB (Federal Security Service) as insidious as the KGB and if anything even more of a law unto itself.

Regular readers of the "quality press" will already know how journalists like Anna Politkovskaya have been shot in broad daylight for investigating and writing about the truth, how Litvinenko was poisoned in London by Russians who brought polonium into the UK to put in his tea, and how the "oligarchs" who made vast fortunes out of Russian privatisation are now salting away their wealth in places like London. Harding builds on all this to explain how Russia is hardening back into an authoritarian state in which senior politicians enrich themselves, links with international organised crime grow, freedom of speech is crushed and the gaps between rich and poor widen.

Harding's outspoken stance attracted adverse attention from the FSB from the outset. He repeatedly found evidence of his flat being entered - not to steal anything, but leaving a window open next to his son's bed in a high rise flat, tampering with a computer screen, even following the old trick of placing a sex manual beside his own bed - weird signals to unnerve him and his family. Eventually, he was told he would have to leave because of some irregularity in his paperwork, a convenient and overused charge, and he was refused entry, his visa stamped "annulled" on a return flight to Moscow. Perhaps Harding's cardinal sin in the eyes of Putin and his henchmen was the journalist's inevitable association with the US embassy cables critical of Russia published as "Wikileaks" in "The Guardian".

"Mafia state" is written with the air of breathless haste of an article written to meet a deadline, but, as a book, requires more careful editing. Passages often seem disjointed, and although the chapters are themed, they tend to dodge back and forth in time rather confusingly, with continual use of the present tense for past events an added distraction. Harding's courage may include a touch of foolhardiness, and his apparent surprise at being thrown out of the country appears a little naive.

In the interests of balance, he could have shown a greater understanding of the fear, ignorance, insecurity or conditioning which may explain the lack of democracy and suppression of freedom in the Former Soviet Union. Also, perhaps we are not quite as politically and even morally superior as we like to assume.

I would have liked a bit less on Harding's family members (details no doubt included to bring home the reality of the harassment they suffered in Russia) and more on the background to some of the issues covered, in particular the political upheavals in the various outlying republics. A few more maps would have been invaluable. In fact, I found some good ones on Google images which increased my grasp of the geopolitics a good deal.

Overall, this is an important record of some alarming trends in a rising, resource-rich power which could have major implications for the rest of the world. We need to be aware of all this corruption, even if we are powerless to do anything about it, and Harding has done us a service in putting himself on the line to expose the truth. I also have him to thank for introducing me to the wonderful "Peredvizhniki" painters who captured the beauty of C19 rural Russia.

Luke Harding was the Guardian Moscow correspondent from 2004 until he was kicked out of Russia in 2011. His book is part collection of articles on contemporary Russia, part personal memoir of the events leading up to his final goodbye. I found the personal side of the book particularly powerful: break ins into his family home, bugging, and then termination of the accreditation, its reversal, deportation, reversal of that, and the effect all of this has on his family life, particularly his two young children. Some pretty important people must have been wasting a lot of time on his case. With the net-result of now finding their country accurately described as a "Mafia State" in this book.

In one of the last chapters entitled "The File" Harding describes how he suddenly realized what had happened to him: a dose of the soft terror perfected by the secret police in former Eastern Germany under the heading "Zersetzung" (dissolution). I had heard of "Zersetzung" as in "Wehrkraftzersetzung", the weakening of the will to fight in WWII, which was punishable by death. Harding discovers that under the last East German leader Erich Honecker Zersetzung became an academic discipline with the aim of discouraging the victim to such an extent that (s)he simply shuts up; for which there is another nice German word: "mundtot". He meets an ex-Professor of "operational psychology" (read Zersetzung), who still takes some pride in the methods he helped develop. This is amusing only with historical distance. But at least the man has regained enough moral clarity since the demise of his former bosses to realize that his behavior had been a mistake.

The East-German methods of Zersetzung were used throughout the former Warsaw Pact countries. And as Harding tells us in disturbing detail, they are now resurfacing in Russia. Combined with the "hard terror" of persecuting and even murdering dissenters, about which he also writes. Read this book to learn what it means to live in a state run by people who cannot abide being criticized.

Luke Harding's chilling account of his four years as Moscow correspondent of the Guardian newspaper is one of the finest journalism memoirs I have read. Indeed it's one of the outstanding books of 2011. Written with the pace and immediacy of a cold war thriller, Harding describes how the modern face of Russia propagated by the Putin/ Medvedev governments is merely a sham and that it frequently descends into a hybrid of Soviet Union-paranoia and Sub-Saharan klepotocracy.

In painting this image of modern Russia he skilfully intersperses his own experiences as a reporter (including an extraordinary psychological war waged against him and his family by the FSB, including break ins to their home, phone hacking, surveillance and all manner of dirty tricks) , which culminates in his expulsion from the country last year. The most vividly told parts are Harding's 2008 reports from Georgia, when invading Russian troops in concert with militia groups carried out appalling acts of ethnic cleansing. This is an unflattering but necessary account of a complex and an oft-misunderstood country, whose people have been pillaged by a class of oligarchs and whose rulers remain as vicious and uncompromising as they did in the depths of the Cold War.