The Red Hotel
Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War
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4.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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. By1945, 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 battlefront, 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 neutralization of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
