Expelled A journalist's descent into the Russian mafia state

This terrifying, bold expose opens with the 2007 break-in at Harding's Moscow apartment , starting the brutal state campaign to deport him from increasingly repressive Russia. Harding, foreign correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian, knows his place is bugged, his every move tailed, and all his contacts closely watched by the Russian Federal Security Service, or FBS, successor to the KGB, as he tries to monitor the national mood under the authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin. Digging in areas where foreigners rarely dare to probe, the correspondent stirs the Kremlin's ire when he penetrates Putin's regime with its select hierarchy, secrecy, intimidation of rivals, and a multibillion-dollar fortune to maintain its power. He has a ringside seat at the bloody Russia-Georgia war, talks to a few Kremlin foes and political rivals, and gets an invite to Lefortovo, the legendary KGB prison, for questioning. Following his stories of WikiLeaks' Russian revelations, Harding is deemed "an enemy of the state" and the FSB harassment accelerates full-tilt. Absorbing, defiant, and essential, Harding systematically picks at the festering economic and political wounds inflicted by the repressive and corrupt Russian state on its people before his deportation to England. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Guardian's former Moscow bureau chief provides a firsthand account of the kleptocratic spy state that is Vladimir Putin's Russia. Prior to his posting in Moscow in 2007, British journalist Harding was stationed in Berlin; in a final, chilling chapter of this delineation of the pernicious post-Soviet security system, he compares what he experienced with the spying and terror routinely practiced by the former East Germany Stasi. Soon after the author arrived in Moscow, the flat where he lived with his wife and children was broken into, the window left open and objects subtlety moved. This sneaky psychological exercise would be repeated over the four years Harding managed to stick it out, especially after he and his newspaper had revealed embarrassing information about the corruption and repression practiced by the Putin regime. The author knew the identities of the "ghosts" who broke into his flat, bugged his phone and routinely followed him, because he was summoned to Lefortovo prison for interrogation by Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB where Putin cut his teeth. Deemed an enemy of the state, Harding was also in a unique position to observe up close the machinations of Putin's paranoid, anti-Western Russia, run by siloviki, or "power guys" intent on protecting their interests at all costs and repressing any opposition. The author was on the frontlines of coverage of the Georgian insurrection in 2008, the Chechen terrorist attacks in the Moscow metro of 2010 and the rise of anti-ethnic thuggery. He proves a keen, sensitive chronicler of the growing chasm between Russia's haves and have-nots. An astute testimony of a regime grown intractably dastardly.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.