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The wartime journalist enjoys an enviable image: a hardened idealist, filing pages at the front and interpreting the chaos of battle for audiences at home. During World War II, expectations of thrills and rewards drew ambitious Western journalists to the Soviet Union. From the first shots, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 was clearly a historic turning point. The reporters eventually dispatched to Moscow would surely enjoy a privileged view of the clash.
“The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War” by Alan Philps documents the lives of these British, American and Australian journalists. According to him, the greatest dangers they faced weren’t bullets, they were boredom. Far from accompanying the Red Army in its battles against the fascist invaders, the correspondents spent most of their time at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, a tsarist-era hotspot for playboy galas and rendezvous that became a gilded cage during the war . By submitting censored stories while playing the role of adventurous journalists, they contributed to a propaganda operation by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union in an attempt to control Western public opinion.
Stuck in the Metropol, the reporters had nothing to do but eat their ample rations and drink their regime-supplied vodka. (The Soviet government made sure that foreigners were not affected by the bottlenecks of a war-torn country.) Many of the journalists did not speak Russian, and even those who did could not travel through Moscow to report. Even on the rare occasions they actually left, contact with a Soviet citizen could result in their sources being thrown into the Gulag. As a result, Western reporters – and, through them, their audiences – based their stories on official statements and Soviet newspapers. The government-supplied interpreters who helped Westerners navigate this system “became the eyes and ears of visiting journalists,” according to Philps.
There was little truth in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The heroes of Philps’ ensemble bio are those who attempted to smuggle this precious cargo out of the country. Ironically, the interpreters, officially responsible for casting the news in a pro-Stalin light, proved to be a weak point in the system. Some of them, who suffered from the regime’s atrocities and hypocrisy, saw their contacts with the journalists as a chance to clarify the matter. They did so under difficult conditions, not least because of the sexual harassment the all-female interpreters were subjected to by some of the predominantly male journalists.
Among his heroes is the translator Nadia Ulanovskaya, a Ukrainian who first became a revolutionary and then a spy. Ulanovskaya was tasked with assisting Australian journalist Godfrey Blunden. She went beyond her portfolio to help him see the real Moscow: cramped spaces, tight rations, fear and resilience. Blunden used these experiences and his reputation as a war correspondent to write a novel that featured Ulanovskaya and other sources as thinly veiled characters. When the book was published, Ulanovskaya and her family were spending years in forced labor in Siberia for anti-Soviet activities.
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At least Blunden wrote something close to the truth. Philps criticizes other correspondents for actively conspiring to keep the truth secret. A combination of ideological sympathy for the Soviet project, the financial incentives of a pro-Soviet line (including tax-free income while in the country and domestic book sales), and the unspoken but real physical threat of consequences for telling the project the truth resulted in that others were hiding the facts about Stalin’s regime and its shortcomings. Perhaps the culmination of this willing help was the publication in 1943 by New York Times correspondent Ralph Parker of a letter from Stalin in which the dictator promised that the Soviet Union “undoubtedly” wanted to see a strong and independent Poland after the war. (Poland became a Soviet satellite state and Parker lived full-time in Moscow after the war.)
Not all journalists do so badly. Originally pro-Soviet leftist Charlotte Haldane (wife of biologist JBS Haldane) left the Soviet Union believing in the putrefaction of the Stalinist system, a belief that cost her the rest of her marriage and her camaraderie in pro-Soviet circles. Despite these occasional numbers, one wonders if the sacrifices made by Ulanovskaya and other interpreters were worth the risk they took, given how little truth actually managed to find its way into the press.
Philps clearly wants The Red Hotel to do justice to those who have served the truth and punish those who have failed. The structure of the book hampers that claim somewhat. It jumps awkwardly between past, present and future and from one group of interpreters and journalists to another. In a staggering time shift, Haldane returns to England in 1941, where she separates from her husband because she refuses to soften her portrayal of the Stalin government. On the next page, Ulanowskaya and her own husband are on a covert mission in the Weimar Republic in 1921. A more conventional narrative structure might have served the story better, or at least made it easier to keep track of which journalist was shamelessly exploiting which interpreter.
The other challenge Philps faces is historical in nature. As a longtime foreign correspondent with experience in the Soviet Union and Russia, Philps has expertly reconstructed the various stories and settings of the Metropolis. Yet he also seems striving to say more about the role of truth and translation in times of war – and what those wartime experiences can tell about journalism in today’s conflicts.
However, the greatest influence on these issues came from Stalin, Winston Churchill and other rulers. They created the conditions under which war journalists could do anything, and they often did so for cynical reasons. Churchill, Philps reports, wanted journalists to be allowed into the notoriously secretive Soviet Union to convey to the British public the need to divert scarce war supplies to the Communist front. Stalin viewed their admission as an almost unbearable price to pay for receiving this aid. Publishers in Britain and the United States themselves seemed resigned (or worse, determined) to publish what amounted to propaganda while hunting their own audiences. But these powerful figures play a secondary role in the solid story Philps lays out, leaving him instead to condemn the stolen bravery of reporters, most of whom were mere carriers of misinformation.
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However, Philps’ book raises the question of how audiences should interpret news about current conflicts. The emergence of alternative sources, from satellite imagery to social media analysis, means that such a totalizing censorship regime is now becoming more difficult to maintain. Finally, we were able to follow the Wagner group mutiny in real time. But the confusion about the meaning and purpose of the mutiny also shows that mere access to data cannot penetrate the fog of war.
Ultimately, Philps’ book justifies the value of truth, primarily by showing how far a few go to share it. But Philps is also clear-eyed enough to show that the truth doesn’t always come out — at least not easily, and not without cost.
Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel and the untold story of Stalin’s propaganda war
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