Mafia state

Someone has broken into my flat.

Three months after arriving in Russia as the Guardian’s new Moscow bureau chief, I return home from a dinner party. At first, everything appears normal.

And then I see it. It is a strange detail. The window of my son’s bedroom is wide open. The dark symbolism of the open window is not hard to decipher: take care, or your kids might just fall out.

I find myself in a new world. It is a place of unknown rules, of thuggish adversaries. But who are these ghosts? And who sent them?