You will choose to make of this what you choose .
Our Diplomatic Service is a remarkable institution and it is very rare to get anybody to openly comment in the way this guy has .
I accept that the interview may have been granted because we are about to take a more openly forceful way of dealing with Russia .
You may choose to see it as Propaganda , if you wish .
But it is much more than that and in the small matters recorded in the interview , it represents facts not fiction .
Former British Ambassador to Moscow: ''Russia under authority of paranoiacs''
Publication time: 21 February 2011, 13:21
Former British Ambassador in Moscow, Tony Brenton, has published in Daily Mail an article entitled "Bugs, bribes and burglary: When Tony Brenton became Our Man In Moscow, he discovered just how far Russia's paranoid rulers would go to keep power..." He writes:
"Should you get home to find the door to your flat unlocked from the inside, that's just the FSB (the KGB's successor) letting you know they called.
If you pick up the phone to hear your voice played back, as I have, someone is recording your conversations.
Such was my life in Russia during my time as a senior official and then as British Ambassador from 2004 to 2008.
Occasionally the surveillance and harassment were merely funny, such as when a female colleague spotted a handsome man three times in the course of the same day before realizing this was the FSB trailing her.
Relations with Russia have always been difficult.
Life is far from straightforward for British diplomats or journalists in Moscow. Criticism of the state is possible but carefully watched, and the heavy machinery of state security is all too visible.
We were under pressure in all sorts of ways apart from surveillance. After I incurred disapproval with a speech on human rights, thugs in the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi followed me around.
They set up a permanent picket outside my house and tried to break up public meetings I addressed.
I vividly remember the bemused looks of fellow customers as banner-waving Nashi members followed me round a supermarket where I was buying cat food.
This Nashi harassment lasted several months and it was only after the strongest diplomatic protests that they backed off.
The 2006 poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko gave things a further twist.
There was strong suspicion (it is not a "suspicion", but a complete confidence among ordinary people throughout the world ) of Russian involvement - the suspected murderer, a former KGB agent, is now a member of Russia's parliament.
We had to burn some Embassy furniture because of feared radioactive contamination after a visit from someone who may have been involved in Litvinenko's death.
And the political upshot was a spate of diplomatic expulsions.
The Russians then used opaque 'technical problems' to drive the BBC Russian Service off the air.
They seem to have taken a particular aversion to our cultural arm, the British Council, whose offices were invaded by tax inspectors (FSB's standard technique used on those they dislike).
They tried to stop Tony Blair opening a new Council office by having it fail a fire inspection and backed down only when we said he would, if necessary, give his speech on the pavement.
They eventually made us close all the Council's provincial offices by threatening its Russian employees with the attention of the FSB, and tried to frame a British employee on a drink-driving charge.
If that's how they treat foreigners, how do Russia's people fare?
They certainly don't enjoy the freedoms we do. Observers report elections are neither free nor fair.
Indeed, a brave young Russian mathematician has published an analysis showing how implausible the published results are.
The broadcast media are firmly in the state's pocket. Journalists who step out of line are leant on.
I know one who had drugs planted on him. Others are killed. The legal system is regularly bent to the state's purposes.
A leading opposition figure, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was recently convicted on charges that even members of the regime found hard to credit.
Repression allows corruption to thrive. Russia tops the world league table for corruption.
Those who probe too closely face the fate of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky: incarceration without charge, and death in custody.
The elites find it hard to give up power; those who do are more likely to face corruption charges than honourable retirement.
Events in Egypt have already produced echoes in some of Russia's client states: Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
They are a timely reminder to the Russian establishment that the demand for freedom is universal, and will sooner or later have to be met", wrote British diplomat
