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The Red Hotel

The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin's Disinformation War is a 2023 non-fiction book by journalist and author Alan Philps that describes the experiences of British and American war correspondents who were posted to Moscow to cover the Eastern Front from 1941-45. It is published by Headline in the UK and Pegasus in the USA and Canada.

Summary

The Hotel Metropol, a island apart from the rest of Moscow where East-West fraternisation was encouraged during the Second World War

The war correspondents posted to Moscow lived in some luxury in Hotel Metropol but never got to the front line or heard a shot fired in anger. They were prohibited from travelling outside the capital, and the censor restricted their output to what had been reported in the Soviet press. In this wartime gilded cage, some of the most famous reporters of the time, Edgar Snow, C L Sulzberger, Alaric Jacob, Charlotte Haldane and the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, found themselves reliant on their Soviet translators – all of them women – for news and companionship. Leaving the foreign correspondents in no doubt their role was to be part of the Kremlin's propaganda effort, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg said, "In wartime every objective reporter should be shot". The revelation of the book is that some of these Soviet translators, who had to report weekly to the Soviet secret police, were less loyal to Stalin than they appeared and secretly whispered the truth of life in Russia. The book follows in detail the life of the bravest of these translators, Nadezhda Ulanovskaya, a revolutionary socialist in her youth who int he 1930s worked as a spy for Soviet military intelligence in Hamburg, Shanghai and New York. By the time the war broke out in 1941, she had lost her faith in Soviet communism and acted as a secret dissident with the confines of the hotel, despite being under constant police surveillance.

Origin of the book

The author worked at a correspondent in Moscow at various times from 1979 but it was not until he was posted to Tunis in the 1980s that he met the resident BBC Correspondent, Tanya Matthews (née Svetlova), who had been worked as a Soviet assistant in the Metropol to the British correspondent Ronnie Matthews, whom she married. Tanya told Philps the story of a unique period of fraternisation between Soviet citizens and western reporters that was tolerated, even encouraged, in the Metropol in wartime. Much later Philps came across a memoir of Nadezhda Ulanovskaya which opened up new avenues to research life in the Metropol in wartime.

Critical reception

In the New York Times, Lesley M M Blume called the book "disturbingly prescient" about Putin's propaganda war in Ukraine. "Alan Philps documents the lives of Western journalists under Stalin and traces through lines to media relations in Russia today," she wrote. In The Washington Post, Paul Musgrave wrote: "Philps’s book vindicates the value of truth, most of all by depicting the lengths that a rare few will go to share it." Joshua Rubenstein writing in the Wall Street Journal said, "Mr. Philps, who for years reported from Moscow, conveys Nadya Ulanovskaya’s story in stirring detail, both her improbable adventures before World War II and the ordeals she experienced in the Gulag after her arrest in 1948."

The Economist reviewer called it "a compelling and often horrifying tale of moral degradation and occasional heroism superbly told by a seasoned reporter".

The Sunday Telegraph called it “Almost faultlessly balanced between racy narrative and historical analysis." Richard Cockett, in The Literary Review, said the book "gives a superb flavour of the compromises, betrayals and self-delusion required to report on the USSR”. In The Spectator, Peter Pomerantsev, wrote “A spectacular book … Philps is terrific at training a spotlight on the local staff who are so often forgotten, and exposing the moral ambiguities of journalists”. Roger Boyes of The Times called it "a sizzling read full of bitchiness and high jinks” . In History Today, James Rodgers described it as "engaging and insightful ... the subject is more topical than ever."

The Red Hotel was selected as a July read by the New York Times and a book to read on holiday by Sarah Jessica Parker on July 16, 2023.

External links

'Putin's Paranoia' Interview with Alan Philps on Battleground Ukraine podcast

'Red Hotel'. Interview with Al Zambone on Historically Thinking podcast. https://historicallythinking.org/episode-331-red-hotel/

'The Red Hotel' interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN Booknotes+ on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-3nuLkR9DE