Abstract
It takes a good journalist to report Russia right. The country is, to a unique degree, both intoxicating and depressing. Its people, its culture, its “soul” (there is no better word) are powerfully addictive. With Communism gone and the Cold War over, Russia had the capacity and resources to remake itself internally and become a positive force in the wider world. But the toxic combination of a predatory political elite, a pliable legal system and out-of-control security agencies has instead sapped and corrupted Russian public life and is turning the country into a backward and embittered outsider in world affairs.
Luke Harding served as Guardian correspondent in Moscow from 2007 to 2011. He fully met the challenge of reporting on the darker aspects of the Russian scene. And he paid the price by becoming the first Western staff correspondent to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War. This book is an account of his time in Moscow. As with the best journalistic memoirs, it uses his personal history to paint a compelling picture of the rotten state of Russian governance. Very early in his time there his newspaper carried an interview with Boris Berezovsky (exiled oligarch and běte noir of the Russian authorities). Thereafter Harding appears to have been a marked man.
I have to confess to a certain fellow feeling with his graphic account of subsequent FSB (heir to the KGB) intrusions into his flat, Kafkaesque encounters with myriad branches of disapproving Russian officialdom, and the pettifogging legalism which was used to justify his final expulsion from the country. As British Ambassador at about the same time (full disclosure: I make a brief appearance in Harding's book) I too incurred Russian official displeasure. So I can personally testify that Harding captures very well the hunted feeling that the Russians so expertly engineer in such circumstances.
To his immense credit, Harding did not avoid or tone down the nastier stories that today's Russia produces in such abundance (as he suggests other resident journalists might be guilty of doing). He personally knew the brave human rights defenders who stood up to Putin's unspeakable Chechen puppet, Ramzan Kadyrov, and were subsequently murdered on Moscow street corners. He reported fully on the judicial travesty that was the second trial of opposition oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He did the same following the judicial murder of Sergei Magnitsky — a lawyer employed by a UK-based firm who uncovered a huge fraud organised from within the Russian security establishment, died of maltreatment while held without charge in a Russian jail, and whose suspected killers the British government still scandalously refuses to exclude from the UK, despite Magnitsky's strong UK links.
No kneejerk Russophobe, Harding reported the 2008 Georgia war with commendable even-handedness — avoiding the blunder of so many Western journalists and foreign ministries that instinctively blamed Russia for the start of the war. But the stories that brought his spell in Moscow to its untimely end were those produced by The Guardian's acquisition of the WikiLeaks files — with their copious documentation of the explosion of corruption in Putin's Russia, going to the very top, and spotlighting — as the Magnitsky case had already shown — the very close links binding Russia's security and criminal networks. This was more than enough for the FSB; Harding had to go. The decision can have been taken only at high political level, so Harding's chosen title, Mafia State, is no mere journalistic exaggeration.
Harding's picture of Russia captures well the bravery of individuals, some now dead, who have stood up against the regime, as well as the physical beauty of the place. What, for understandable reasons, he omits completely is the humdrum reality of a country whose economy and society are slowly but steadily normalising after the dehumanising distortions of Communism, and whose people are growing richer, better travelled and diminishingly tolerant of the squalid political dispensation they have inherited.
It was after Harding left that these changes, unrecorded by virtually all Western commentators, exploded into the huge popular demonstrations against corruption and fraudulent politics which — without yet bringing down the Putin system — have cracked its facade of invulnerability. Harding's book is an excellent account of the evils of today's Russia and the tribulations he underwent there. I do not want to place too much weight on the similarity of my Russian experiences to his. But I sense that he, like me, nevertheless departed Russia with a real, if inexplicable, feeling of regret. And I hope that he, like me, now looks forward with some confidence to a time when the evils we experienced will begin to be cured.