The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War
by Alan Philps.
Pegasus, 451 pp., $29.95
On September 14, 1941, a select few among the Western journalists who had rushed to Moscow after Hitler’s forces attacked the Soviet Union the previous June got what they had spent weeks clamoring for. Nikolai Palgunov, the head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry press department, telephoned each one with good news: a small group of them was going to be taken to the front, close to the city of Smolensk, which had just fallen to the Germans.
To enter the USSR, each journalist had needed a visa, which Stalin had reluctantly authorized after British prime minister Winston Churchill—now an ally thanks to Hitler’s recklessness—applied pressure. The Americans were not yet full participants in the war, and Churchill wanted encouraging reports about Soviet resistance to appear in the British and American media. Stalin came to see the value of this. He gave permission for the Western reporters’ frontline trip because of an upcoming meeting in Moscow at which President Roosevelt’s envoy, Averell Harriman, and Lord Beaverbrook, the British minister of supply, were to tell Stalin how much military hardware, tanks, trucks, aircraft, and ammunition they could give Russia. They would obviously be less helpful if German forces were about to capture Moscow in a few weeks’ time.
Stalin believed in keeping maximum control of foreign reporters. Their stories had to be cleared by Soviet censors. They were forbidden to interview Soviet citizens. They could only employ officially vetted translators and fixers. Above all, they had to live in the Metropol Hotel, a faded tsarist relic close to Red Square. At a time when ordinary Muscovites struggled in freezing apartments with a ration of 125 grams of rye bread per day, the foreign reporters were amply supplied with caviar, cream cakes, and vodka, plus the luxury of hot water and en suite bathrooms.
This gilded cage and the tensions and rivalries bubbling within it are vividly described in The Red Hotel by Alan Philps, a British journalist who worked for Reuters in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and for during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Trawling through British Foreign Office archives as well as diaries and memoirs by Russians and Westerners, Philps has written an engaging account full of anecdotes about the hotel’s anarchic wartime atmosphere and the eccentric characters who passed through it.
