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

This is by far the best English-language book on the nature of both the Russian state and Russian society during the disastrous period of Putin's (mis)rule. As it is very likely that Putin will remain in power for at least several more years, this volume is a 'must' read for those interested in and worried about the dire impact that the Russian mafiosi are having on their own country and, inevitably, on the rest of the world. Unlike most Westerners, Harding perceives the very essence of many of those in power in Moscow - their shady past, their criminal mentality, their selfish preoccupations, their professional incompetence and, perhaps most important and dangerous, their brilliant ability to lie and to deceive so many of their fellow-citizens as well as naive and poorly informed foreigners. It's astonishing that the author saw through this pretence (sometimes known as Potemkin villages) so quickly. Moreover, he writes stylishly and vividly. Essential reading. I'm so glad it's now available in paperback!
Martin Dewhirst, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow, Scotland

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.