The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War

by Alan Philps

Overview

The untold history of Moscow's Metropol hotel—a fervent spot of intrigue, secrets, and the center of Stalin's nefarious propaganda during WWII.

*A Washington Post Best Book of the Year*

In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By 1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. To turn these reporters into Kremlin mouthpieces, Stalin imposed the most draconian controls – unbending censorship, no visits to the battle front, and a ban on contact with ordinary citizens.

The Red Hotel explores this gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds. On the surface, this regime served Stalin well: his plans to control Eastern Europe as a Sovietised ‘outer empire’ were never reported and the most outrageous Soviet lies went unchallenged.

But beneath the surface the Metropol was roiling with intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were secret dissidents who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Using British archives and Soviet sources, the unique role of the women of the Metropol, both as consummate propagandists and secret dissenters, is told for the first time.

At the end of the war when Lenin returned to Red Square, the reporters went home, but the memory of Stalin’s ruthless control of the wartime narrative lived on in the Kremlin. From the weaponization of disinformation to the falsification of history, from the moving of borders to the neutralisation of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639364275
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/04/2023
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	93,591
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Alan Philps served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph. He has been foreign editor of the Telegraph and editor of The World Today, the Chatham House magazine. His book, The Boy from Baby House 10, captured the mood of Russia in the 1990s through the experience of an abandoned child. It has been translated into five languages, turned into an NBC documentary, and the film rights are currently optioned by Footprint Films.

Editorial Reviews

05/22/2023

In this riveting chronicle, former Reuters Moscow correspondent Philips (The Boy from Baby House 10) recounts how Western reporters flocked to the Soviet city to cover Russia’s clash with Nazi invaders. Sequestered in the gloomy, seen-better-days Metropol Hotel, foreign journalists were forbidden to travel to the front lines. Churchill—himself a former war correspondent—had pressured Stalin to accept the foreign press, but once installed in the Metropol, journalists faced draconian censorship. The correspondents were unhappy about “being offered hospitality instead of the chance to do any real reporting,” but many stayed. As a result, Philips writes, “Stalin was able to suppress all negative coverage of the Soviet Union—in part thanks to the complicity of the press.” Even after they’d returned home, most of the reporters kept to a “journalistic code of omerta,” refusing to reveal the censorship that had taken place and call into question their own integrity. Quoting extensively from wartime and postwar memoirs of Western and Russian participants, Philips draws incisive comparisons to current Russian disinformation campaigns, including Putin’s insistence on refering to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a “special operation.” This exhilarating history has noteworthy implications for the present. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"The Red Hotel is a vivid, intimate, and engaging account of foreign journalists confined to Moscow’s Metropole Hotel by Stalin during World War II—and their relations with young women translators sent by the Soviets to spy on and assist them. Philps’s fascinating narrative details the brutal suffering of innocent Russians in Stalin’s Gulag and evokes dark parallels between Stalin and Putin in their obsession with controlling the flow of information at home."

Susan Wels

"Ostensibly the story of the Allied reporters based during World War II in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, the real heroes of the book are the female translators who at great personal risk sought to tell the truth about Stalin. A timely reminder of Russia’s ambitions and desire to shape the historical narrative.

Andrew Lownie

"'The truth was the first casualty’ in Alan Philps’s The Red Hotel, a disturbing expose of Stalin’s ruthless control of the media narrative during WWII. At center stage is the harrowing plight of female translators at the Metropol, forced to perpetuate a Soviet disinformation campaign. A timely and sobering reminder of how the absence of a free press can forever change the course of history.

Lisa Brahin

"The best histories set in Russia during World War II call to our sensual appreciation of tangible tastes and sensations—lavish wealth with a dark river running through it; passionate courage on the part of the subjugated and impoverished. Alan Philps, veteran Moscow correspondent, skillfully delivers this chilling tale cloaked in a mood steeped in velvet luxury and fitted with a poison lining.

Carole Adrienne

"Alan Philps tells the provocative story about foreign journalists who were sent by Winston Churchill to Russia in 1941 to report on the Eastern Front. The Red Hotel exposes the extraordinary lengths to which Stalin went to control the media narrative in World War II. This history may also be critical to our present day appreciation of how Putin, adopting Stalin's playbook, is attempting to control the media narrative, thus swaying public opinion and, ultimately, winning a war. The Red Hotel is a must-read for all students of history and public policy.

Lis Wiehl

"Alan Philips has given readers a true gem. The Red Hotel is by turns harrowing and heart breaking, heroic and squalid, arousing and soul-destroying, epic and claustrophobic. There are a myriad of books of Russia’s war time experience, perhaps the most profound episode in the history of the modern west, but The Red Hotel stands out among them for its humanity, scholarship, and brilliant, captivating prose.

author of Napoleon: The Decline and Fall Michael Broers

"Alan Philips has given readers a true gem. The Red Hotel is by turns harrowing and heart breaking, heroic and squalid, arousing and soul-destroying, epic and claustrophobic. There are a myriad of books of Russia’s war time experience, perhaps the most profound episode in the history of the modern west, but The Red Hotel stands out among them for its humanity, scholarship, and brilliant, captivating prose.

Michael Broers

2023-03-21
Unsettling account of how a cadre of foreign correspondents in Moscow during World War II were pressed to acquiesce to the Kremlin’s censorship.

British journalist Philps, who served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph, frames his multilayered story of wartime foreign journalists around their base at the Metropol Hotel, which, since opening in 1905, “has been witness to the seminal events of Russia’s tempestuous twentieth century history.” In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, journalists from the U.S., Britain, and Australia were allowed to stay and report on the war—as long as it suited Stalin. Winston Churchill, formerly a journalist himself, pressured Stalin to allow the journalists access, yet it soon became apparent that the foreign reporters—feted with vodka-fueled “Potemkin banquets” and supplied with young Russian translators and secretaries who were clearly spies and, occasionally, prostitutes—could only report information that shined positive light on the Stalin regime. The author focuses on the plight of a host of journalists, including feminist writer Charlotte Haldane; Ralph Parker, who “tended to rub people the wrong way”; Vernon Bartlett, who “challenged Stalin in public to accept the principle of a free press”; American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White; Alice Moats, a correspondent for Collier’s; and Godfrey Blunden, an “ambitious roving reporter” for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. All tried to follow events on the Eastern Front and were branded either “Kremlin stooges” or “fascists beasts.” Philps also explores the tragic case of Nadya Ulanovskaya, a reputable Russian translator and accomplished spy who grew disillusioned with Stalin and conveyed to Blunden the truth only to be unmasked in his subsequent novel and sent to the gulag along with her family. The muzzling of these journalists by the Kremlin was not revealed for decades, and though overlong, this thoughtful narrative puts their work into the appropriate historical context.

Authoritative, sometimes repetitive history of the terrible ramifications of the silence about Stalin’s lies.

Kirkus Reviews

"In a fascinating and surprising narrative, Alan Philps reveals the untold story of the foreign press and its struggle to circumvent the brutal censorship in Stalin’s Russia to bring the true story of the brutality of life and war in the Soviet Union to the world. Through fine research and engaging writing, The Red Hotel unveils an untold tale of life on the Eastern front during one of the most titanic conflicts in human history."

Laurence Jurdem

"The Red Hotel is a compelling and often horrifying tale of moral degradation and occasional heroism superbly told by a seasoned reporter, Alan Philps, who knew Moscow first-hand in the last years of communism. The shiniest stars in Mr Philps’s book are the female fixers who were controlled by the secret police but managed against the odds to retain a modicum of their integrity."

The Economist

"In this tale of intrigue and suppression, Philps, a journalist, investigates what happened when Stalin decided to allow the Anglo-American Press Corps into the U.S.S.R. — on his terms, of course — between 1941 and 1945. Correspondents were installed at the once-luxurious Metropol Hotel, where they were feted, monitored and fed a steady diet of Kremlin propaganda."

The New York Times Book Review

Philps’s book vindicates the value of truth, most of all by depicting the lengths that a rare few will go to share it. Yet Philps is also clear-eyed enough to show that truth will not always come out — at least, not easily, and not without cost.

The Washington Post

"A riveting trip down the corridors of Soviet deception. Philps's book is almost faultlessly balanced between racy narrative and historical analysis."

Sunday Telegraph

"Alan Philps’s The Red Hotel shines a light on the men and women caught up in Stalin’s propaganda machine and their attempts to tell the truth in a foreign land during a pivotal stage of the war. Philps gives them equal billing and shows the lengths they went to and the risks they took to reveal what life was truly like in Stalin’s Russia."

The Washington Examiner

In The Red Hotel, Mr. Philps conveys Nadya Ulanovskaya’s story in stirring detail, both her improbable adventures before World War II and the ordeals she experienced in the Gulag. Stalin’s tight control of what could be reported—whether from the Metropol or elsewhere—didn’t fool everyone.

The Wall Street Journal