Mafia State

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Hardings 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 FOREWORD FROM THE AUTHOR

A courageous and explosive exposé.

ORLANDO FIGES

Luke Harding is one of the best reporters in the world.
ROBERT SAVIANO

An essential read.
NEW STATESMAN

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 Russias 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 KGBs notorious prison.

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

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