วันอาทิตย์ที่ 13 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. 2554

Mafia State: How One Reporter Became the Enemy of the Brutal New Russia by Luke Harding - review

Account

Luke Harding of his stay in Russia is an alarming figure

Office my best friend was stolen in an interesting way: the intruder used a ladder to reach the second floor window and made a heavily guarded compound in the heart of Moscow not foreign. They took two laptops (but no money or other). Perhaps not coincidentally, occurred on the day of the Cheka.

Cheka secret police Lenin were the precursors of both the infamous Soviet KGB, and the vast empire of modern Russia is stupid and securocrats. December 22 is the big day, when the old ghosts and specters exceeded drinking to celebrate their battles against the enemies of the homeland and abroad. They also play tricks.

A detective quickly concluded, however, that "business rivals" were the obvious culprits. Who were they? My friend (the Moscow correspondent

Newsweek ) was found rigorously questioned when he tried to stop the police nail the blame on me (

Economist

corresponding 's in Moscow and its neighbor).

As the book of Luke Harding in his years in Moscow, captures very well, life in Russia has not changed much: discomfort at random, strange coincidences and interventions of confusion without hope. You really do not lock the office? Why are cigarette butts in my bathroom? Why is my phone battery go flat all the time? I'm going crazy - or really for me

Incidents include most of the small acts of vandalism, ridiculous stunts (someone left a manual on sex in his room) and phones that play the previous conversation. Boneheadedness vengeful official is exasperating. After being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1990, I returned in 1998 was not very popular with the Russian authorities and insisted that visas are issued only when the whole family had AIDS tests (including me after two year old son).

for Harding, accreditation was not renewed and joins an honor roll of journalists (especially Britons and Americans, but also Czech, Danish, Finnish and Hungarian), which Report ruined his chances of a visa. However, as an experienced foreign correspondent and versatile, you can go to another publication. For specialists, the visa ban is a race of the murderer. At least it was only his pride and peace of mind that has suffered. Russian journalists who displease the authorities get maimed or killed. Shortly after the Newsweek

A book review of potential Harding is that it takes the FSB (successor to the KGB main) too seriously. Mockery or ridicule is the best response to their provocations (in Soviet times, to go into hotel rooms with a cheerful "
Raz, DVA, try
[one, two, three] - Goodnight, Comrade Colonel, can you hear me ")?. As we have noted Harding, the world of the FSB is sadly ignorant and paranoid. This should encourage more compassion than fear: Like all tyrants, if you are irritated, they won. However, in cold blood would not have led to this story amusing and disturbing police state Vladimir Putin.

Authorities may have a sense of humor as the possessions of the Lucas family followed us outside Moscow, various bits of hardware log (solar phone charger satellite, an antenna shortwave radio) is lost. When we opened the drawers instead found that someone had put an old-fashioned (in English) of books by Ian Fleming, James Bond. The Russian authorities assume that all correspondents working for the British MI6, which was probably a kind of salvation College
We will probably never know how many misfortunes Harding organized to intimidate him and his family, and how many were just random stones in the Russian manner. It is unclear what he did to annoy the authorities. His journalistic talent to capture the color and character to illustrate the demographic decline, the war in Georgia and around the world youth movements pro-Putin harmful thugs. But these are not state secrets. Putin's personal fortune (another good story) is a taboo subject in the media in Russia, but much discussed elsewhere.



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