THE RED HOTEL

Unsettling account of how a cadre of foreign correspondents in Moscow during World War II were pressed to acquiesce to the Kremlin’s censorship.

British journalist Philps, who served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph, frames his multilayered story of wartime foreign journalists around their base at the Metropol Hotel, which, since opening in 1905, “has been witness to the seminal events of Russia’s tempestuous twentieth century history.” In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, journalists from the U.S., Britain, and Australia were allowed to stay and report on the war—as long as it suited Stalin. Winston Churchill, formerly a journalist himself, pressured Stalin to allow the journalists access, yet it soon became apparent that the foreign reporters—feted with vodka-fueled “Potemkin banquets” and supplied with young Russian translators and secretaries who were clearly spies and, occasionally, prostitutes—could only report information that shined positive light on the Stalin regime. The author focuses on the plight of a host of journalists, including feminist writer Charlotte Haldane; Ralph Parker, who “tended to rub people the wrong way”; Vernon Bartlett, who “challenged Stalin in public to accept the principle of a free press”; American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White; Alice Moats, a correspondent for Collier’s; and Godfrey Blunden, an “ambitious roving reporter” for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. All tried to follow events on the Eastern Front and were branded either “Kremlin stooges” or “fascists beasts.” Philps also explores the tragic case of Nadya Ulanovskaya, a reputable Russian translator and accomplished spy who grew disillusioned with Stalin and conveyed to Blunden the truth only to be unmasked in his subsequent novel and sent to the gulag along with her family. The muzzling of these journalists by the Kremlin was not revealed for decades, and though overlong, this thoughtful narrative puts their work into the appropriate historical context.

Authoritative, sometimes repetitive history of the terrible ramifications of the silence about Stalin’s lies.