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

The Red Hotel: Moscow, 1941. The Metropol Hotel and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda (Disinformation) War, by Alan Philps (First Pegasus Books, 2023, 451 pp, $29.95), a Washington Post 50 Best Books of 2023. Review by Skye Anderson

Mistitled?

If you read and loved Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow (I tried but couldn't finish it), you will love The Red Hotel. The first is a novel and the second is a long piece of non-fiction (451 pages) but both are centered around the Metropol hotel in Moscow (365 rooms). The red cover with yellow-gold letters is mirrored when you take off the cover and find the book is red with yellow-gold front and back inside pages. Red is the color of communism, after all.

However, like Russian novels with too many characters and too many pages for the uninitiated, The Red Hotel covers too much that is not relevant to the hotel (and thus the title) so the book title is a bit misleading but fortunately the subtitle says it all. It could have so easily been a trilogy or just edited down to incidents at the Metropol (less background of the characters) and those residing and working there during WW2.

If you thought the "Dog and Pony Show," The Five O'Clock Follies during the Vietnam Conflict, was a farce, you haven't read The Red Hotel. Most foreign correspondents and reporters lived in the Metropol with nightly banquets and caviar inside for the foreign journalists, freezing and starving outside for the Russian citizens. . . .

Disenchantment

Few of the reporters were fluent in Russian, so the government supplied them with translators who would read the daily papers to their assigned person (and, since these young women were transcripted into service, they also reported back on their reporters' questions and conversations. Some of them even moved in. Both people were issued ration cards that permitted them to shop for delicacies like sugar that the populace could not obtain. The young translators were idealistic communists but many of them soon lost their enthusiasm for their government's doings and changed sides in their minds. It was so hard for both parties to live 'the life of Riley' in the midst of poverty.

Nightly parties alternated among the reporters' rooms but were always liquid (read: vodka). And the biggest complaint was the fact that the bored reporters were not permitted on the battlefield so they not only had to depend on government 'news' in the official Russian papers, but their stories were sent to the censors before they were permitted to be sent to their home countries' papers. Consequently, little news came out of Russia.

In many of the 29 chapters, we follow the lives of perhaps half a dozen Russians and foreign reporters, with the most interesting chapters being about the women. And the reader will learn that the wife of JBS Haldane, that brilliant geneticist, was one of the very few foreign female journalists!

At the end of the book author Alan Philps brings us up to date on the major players and what happened to them during the 50s and even to this day.

And, as the pages are turned, the reader's interest is piqued by accounts of spying and the gulags.

It would help to have a pretty good knowledge of Russia and the Soviet Union for you will run into Averell Harriman, Shostakovich the composer, Edgar Snow, Margaret Bourke-White, Molotov, . . . .