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Luke Harding set himself a difficult task when he took up his post as the Guardian’s main man in Moscow. He had already put his name to a front page story which appeared in the Guardian in April 2007. This was an account of an interview with the arch-oligarch and Kremlin critic, Boris Berezovsky. Harding was not at the interview but added background to the article from Moscow. However, to be in any way associated with Berezovsky was sufficient to incur the wrath of the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB – the successor to the KGB. The offending account was entitled, 'I am plotting a new Russian revolution-London exile Berezovsky says force necessary to bring down President Putin’Putin'.

Just four months after his arrival in Russia he was summoned to the FSB’s FSB's bleak offices in Lefortovo, previously described in Solzhenitsyn’s Solzhenitsyn's account of the Gulag. This is not a place to which foreign journalists are usually admitted. Here he was subjected to an ominous, intensive and unpleasant interview about his background and, in particular, the Berezovsky article. Harding, an energetic and able young reporter, has covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just prior to this daunting questioning his family, including his children, had been subjected to a furtive and ominous break-in. Such systematic bullying at the hands of security-service personnel, the ''siloviki'', was to continue until his virtual eviction at Domodedovo airport in February of last year.