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

by Alan Philps

The untold history of Moscow's Metropol hotel—a fervent spot of intrigue, secrets, and the center of Stalin's nefarious propaganda during WWII.

In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia.  By 1945, 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 battle front, 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 neutralisation of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Soviet Union, Politics, World War II, World History

464 pages, Hardcover

Published July 4, 2023

About the author

Alan Philps is a writer, editor and journalist. He has held senior editorial roles with several newspapers and magazines, including as a correspondent for Reuters, then The Sunday Correspondent, Foreign Editor for the Daily Telegraph, Contributing Editor for The National and most recently as Editor of The World Today. He is co-author, with John Lahutsky, of The Boy from Baby House 10. Prior to his journalistic career, Philps studied Arabic and Persian at the University of Oxford.

Reviews

[Dana Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I should not give a review since I did not finish the book; so please take that into consideration. However, it was just too dry to finish. The book is well researched, but its narratives throughout are just meh.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book blends the intrigue and romance of the life of Western journalists and their female translators holed up in Moscow’s top hotel in the 1940s with the horror of Stalin’s regime. I enjoyed it but found some of the narrative a bit disjointed and hard to follow at times. But the account of the lives of the Russian women translators,the risks they took in working with Westerners and the punishment that they endured as a result is both compelling and chilling.

[Emily Macdonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really thorough, interesting deep dive into the lesser known impact of Stalinism on foreign media and it’s larger affect on the world then and today. I learnt so much and enjoyed the focus on personal stories of the Russian women!

[Nichole]

Parts were good but stories never felt
Finished and the time jumps were frustrating. But I stopped reading after the line describing a translator as “like all women, she was catty and petty.”

No.

[Alex Nagler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly this was a good book in need of an editor. Like my copy from the library had moderate copy edits in the margins for typos and repeated sentences.

[Paul Shotsberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating behind the scenes history of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. Living in the United States we think we understand government control, but we’re rank amateurs compared to the Soviets. The oppression and sheer terror people lived in under Stalin is difficult to imagine, and yet, there were brave individuals who rose above the recriminations and threats, and their stories are inspiring.

[Anonymouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "The Red Hotel" alongside Orlando Figes' "The Story of Russia". They make a great pairing. Figes, who has published several books on Russian political and cultural history, provides an overview of 1000+ years of history to track the Russian origin myth up to and through the war in Ukraine. Alan Philps focuses on the journalists who were clustered in the Hotel Metropol during WW2 and especially on the Russian women who acted as their translators and fixers (plus sometimes lovers and spies). Figes provides a cultural background while Philps presents it's practical implementation.

It is popularly believed that Lenin created the Bolshevik propaganda machine that created the glorious vision of the USSR, but reading Figes helps us to understand that Russia has always relied on fiction to refine itself and that Soviet and post-Soviet control of news was little different. Russia has never had a free press and open discussion of ideas.

Figes shows us a Russia that focused its nationalism on the person of the Tsar and that this imagining did not wane in the modern era. Military and political heroes and the Communist Party have served in this role as well. Today we have the cult of Putin. During WW2 there was the cult of Stalin.

Clustering the foreign press corps in Hotel Metropol served Stalin's government by making it easier to keep a watch on possibly dangerous activities and also to present a fiction of plenty in the form of hot water and good food at a time when peasants were starving. The journos enjoyed these luxuries and the useful camaraderie of shared work resources and the congenial social life of living together, but they were not deceived. Individuals varied, though, on their willingness to push against the system in an attempt to do good work.

No one in Moscow or at the international newspapers who published the stories filed from Moscow believed that the stories were accurate. Russians were forbidden to consort with foreigners and government press officers were careful to keep the press corps away from seeing anything that was not carefully orchestrated. Again, some reporters fought harder against these restrictions than others.

The Red Hotel is a popular book, not scholarly, and it is fun to read, especially if you ever visited the USSR. My heart is broken to read that Hotel Metropol has been remodeled to death. I have not stayed there but I have stayed in the Hotel Ukraina and visited many old, architecturally wonderful buildings in Vladivostok.

I want to thank the publishers of this book for putting the footnotes at the bottom of each page instead of as endnotes. I want to scold the editors for not assuring that the footnotes were all in the same style.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing the depraved DNA baked into the rulers of Russia from czars to Putin. Seems the only outlet for the populace is silence or vodka. The Soviet physical gulags have been replaced with psychological ones where barbed wires are government firewalls.

Very sad how countries like Russia, China, N Korea, and Iran torture, murder, and abuse their own.

Doesn’t help when the west, especially progressives and recently misguided nativists turn a blind eye.

[erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

i absolutely love all the women in this book. their courage and the choices they had to make can’t be underestimated- such an interesting read and insight into life as a foreigner in the ussr during ww2. it’s a perspective i’ve never seen before and well worth looking into

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so delighted and intrigued by the book A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles that finding this non-fiction account of the Metropol Hotel was thrilling alas it was a horrible disappointment. Everyone is familiar with the current trend in news of journalists interviewing other journalists for the story. I, and I believe most others, find this technique a cop-out. I expect a true journalist to get to the story with interviews and anecdotes from participates and victims. The journalists at the Metropol Hotel during Stalin's reign in Russia were confined to the hotel, were not permitted to interact with the population of Russia. They submitted stories written after hearing the local news being read/translated by assistants. The author Alan Philps wrote this book using the same technique, from scraps taken from the journalists diaries, journals and memoirs. These journalists had no experiences in Moscow unless gathering in one room with other journalists and drinking vodka from sun to sun, everyday was memorable. I wanted to hear about the people of the Metropol, the famous guests, the characters of the wait staff, the doormen. The best snippit in the book was chapter 24 titled The Metropol's invisible wall which actually spoke of life in the hotel. The photo section of the book was tipped-in UPSIDE DOWN!! There were many typos. I would not recommend this book.

Quotable:

She (Alice Leone Moats) was fully committed to an adventure that had started as a joke.

She (Charlotte Haldane) chafed at Stalin's abandoning anti-religious propaganda and reopening churches, which she saw as a cheap ploy to please the Christian lobby in the US Congress.

In the recollections recorded by her daughter Maya, Nadya (Nadezhda Ulanovskaya) does not say how she felt about seeing her children again, or indeed which of her three were there, or how they greeted her... she saw her life story not in personal terms but through the lens of the politics on the twentieth century.

As (A.T.) Cholerton put it, 'They are going to fight the Germans on Russian soil, wearing British uniforms and carring American arms. There in a sentence you have the history of the Poles.'

[K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Red Hotel was a sometimes interesting but mostly unexceptional look at members of the Western press corps in Moscow during WWII. It also describes the lives of Russian translators who assisted the press, some of whom, “contrived, at great personal risk, to reveal the truth about life under Stalin.” (from the Introduction) There are a lot of colorful characters and interesting side plots here for anyone who enjoys Russian or WWII history. The fascinating, full-of-political-intrigue events described here are not particularly well known and I applaud Alan Philps for bringing these obscure historical figures into better light.

The main flaw with this book is its disjointedness and the sense that the author essentially compiled a handful of autobiographies. Luckily for the author, many of these reporters and translators wrote memoirs about their exceptional lives, which are of course invaluable resources for writing about a person. But to draw only (or at least, very heavily) from their self-descriptions runs the risk of painting a biased and incomplete portrait. It could be that good third-party or secondary sources weren’t available; it could be that all nonfiction is really just a mish mash of facts from other places and I’m being unfair to this particular book. But I don’t get the sense that the author added much extra to the narrative that I couldn’t have gotten by just reading each of those individual memoirs.

If you liked this book, you would probably also like Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport. Her book described American and British emigres and officials who were taken by surprise when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1918, then trapped in a deteriorating situation along the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg.

I would recommend this to those with an interest in Russian and/or mid 20th century history, but not the general reader.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a well-researched and well-written piece of history that reads like a thriller. It is set in the same hotel as A Gentleman in Moscow during World War II. The focus is on the journalists and their Russian translators who had to do their job under Stalin's rules and system of informants that strangled the journalists and pretty much kept them in the dark. Sadly, some took an easy way out, and parroted Stalin's story and enjoyed life in relative comfort. A few of their translators tried bravely to get the truth out about Stalin's regime and paid a very dear price for their bravery and pursuit of truth.

Stalin's scheme to muzzle the press worked very well, and the truth about what was really going in in Russia trickled out slowly. The stories of the female Russian translators who tried to get the truth out are heart-wrenching, and Philps thorough story brings the truth out about their bravery so many years later.

The story is frightening and brings out the problems that the lack of a true free press can bring. Philps afterword draws the parallels between Stalin and Putin's control of the press, and shows how this story from the past applies to current day events, in very blunt fashion.

My only critique of this book, is that the characters living and working in this hotel became a little disjointed. There were a lot of characters and a lot of stories all worth telling, but this reader got a little mixed up in the process. A small problem in a terrific set of stories.

I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in Russian history, or for someone looking for a little background to understand the current conflict in Ukraine.

[James Hallmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t believe I had heard of the Metropol Hotel (a pre-Soviet luxury hotel in Moscow) until I read Gentleman in Moscow, and then I wanted to know more, the real story of the Metropol. I found this book which is not about the Metropol but is mostly set in the hotel or at least revolves around the hotel. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, western reporters in the Soviet Union (mostly all in Moscow) were put in the Metropol Hotel for their protection and to control what they saw and heard. The reporters were mostly British with a few Americans sprinkled in. They also were all prone to be “pro-Soviet,” supporting the communist beliefs as being superior to that of the capitalist west. Over time many of them realized the corruption of the soviet system but still believed in the cause. A few others came to different realizations. The real story though is the translators hired to work with the reporters. They were women and came from interesting and diverse backgrounds…spies, Jews, intellectuals, all impoverished. The book covers both the reporters and the translators and is painstakingly researched and synthesized. I appreciated the final chapter which was a “what became of” chapter, detailing what happened to these folks after the war ended and they left the Metropol. More often than not the translators wound up in the gulags of Siberia living in horrific conditions. But they survived.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Metropol is a legendary Moscow hotel seeped in Russian history and tradition. During the second world war after Hitler invaded Russia, European journalists were posted to Moscow in an attempt to ease the uneasy alliance with the Western allies. No true information about the Red Army ever leaked out from the Metropol, home base of journalists and their Russian translators. Not surprisingly, Stalin controlled every word that was released.

What was indeed surprising was that correspondents who sympathized with the Soviets rather quickly realized that the USSR was no worker's paradise. The same change of loyalties also affected some of the Russian female employees at the Metropol.

Told through diaries and memoirs, this book gives the personal, inside story of what is was like to live through Stalin's reign of terror. Those who associated with foreigners were considered traitors. Scores of innocent people, including those who worked with foreign correspondents at the Metropol were eventually punished by exile to the Siberian gulag or execution. An afterward to the book outlines the similarities of Stalin's modus operandi to that of Vladimir Putin.

[Guilherme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro bastante revelador principalmente para quem ainda tá a tentar perceber como e com quais ferramentas, regimes totalitários como este de estaline, conseguem manipular totalmente um povo. O controlo da impressa e da liberdade de expressão como reportados neste livro são um dos primeiros passos que assistimos aquando da ascensão de regimes autocráticos, um exemplo perfeito no tempo atual será dos Estados Unidos onde Donald Trump já restringiu a liberdade de imprensa a várias organizações jornalísticas que não se vergavam perante o medo de se expresarem com o verdadeiro jornalismo neutro. Apeguei me também bastante a vários personagens principalmente a Nadya ou Tanya que ao terem nascido dentro da União Soviética têm claro um orgulho pela nação como todos nós temos mas também conseguem distinguir e se separar quando percebem que os meios não justificam o fim e os sacrifícios que tiveram de fazer ao longo da história apresentam-nos um vislumbre para dentro da realidade do povo soviético que foi o que mais sofreu na era de Estaline

[Babs Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging writing, and good way to tell the story--by focusing on the Russian women who were the interpreters for the British, Australian, and American journalists in Moscow as WWII raged. The story is one reminding us of the dangers of press censorship coupled with reporters' willful blindness. Stalin was a monster. But no one chose to see that amid a moment when the world desperately needed a new economic model. So much hope went into communism only to see it destroyed by a tyrant. And no one willing to tell that truth because they didn't want it to be true.

Knowing the history helps in reading this book because the author spends little time with any context-setting larger history. Readers need to know the players and the game to get the most out of this book. It's a slice of history amid a revolutionary time, and even one chapter of that stage-setting would have been nice.

Having just read Fierce Ambition about Maggie Higgins, and her fellow war correspondents, was a nice complement to this book.

[E_F_S · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Red Hotel" by Alan Philps attempts to dissect the complex political landscape of the Soviet Union during World War 2, and the role Stalinist censorship played in how the world was able to view the events. The book ultimately falls short of delivering a comprehensive and unbiased analysis. While the book purports to provide an in-depth examination of the embedded journalists' conflicts and power dynamics in providing press coverage in Stalin's Soviet Union. The text is marred by a range of shortcomings that hinder its effectiveness as a reliable source of information. Most of the text appears to be a cut and paste job without much analysis.

This is not a deep dive into really anything, except the background of a luxury hotel going through the changing tide of Russian History.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, if uneven, account of western allies reporting from Stalin's Moscow Metropolitan Hotel during WWII. Not sure if the focus was supposed to be that of the western reporters difficulties reporting the truth, or the consequences that befell their local translators and handlers. In the end it managed to draw lines between the western reporters, the hotel, and the local women who acted both as translators and handlers for their charges, many of whom fell victim to Stalin's purges and pograms.

Also a distraction was the method od annotations of sources, could have been a much smoother read if the annotations/notes/bibliography had been left to end notes.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

could have used some editing. there we a bunch of typos and repeated sentences. the book was also 200 pages longer than it needed to be. this book would have been better served by picking just a few people to follow - Parker and Valentina, Nadya and Alex - and using them to tell the story. he just kept introducing people and then wouldn't mention them for 70 pages, and it turned into a repetition of the same info over and over. the reporters couldn't really leave the hotel, they drank a lot, they were annoyed thier stuff was censored. for such a long book, I feel like I didn't really learn any details about anyone or anything outside of the four people listed above.

[Rui Barbosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mais do que a história do hotel, onde se instalavam os principais correspondentes de guerra durante a invasão da Russia pelas tropas nazis, a história de como Estaline os usou para controlar a informação e passar uma imagem que iludiu o ocidente, os tornou aliados contra os alemães e depois como foram descartados quando já não interessava. Alem disso, uma visão crua de como a população soviética era controlada, explorada, condenada e enviada para os gulags, nomeadamente aquelas que eram as mulheres tradutoras nomeadas para acompanhar e controlar a informação que passava para esses correspondentes de guerra. Uma perspectiva diferente da participação da URSS na II Guerra Mundial!

[Pedro Ponce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un buen libro. Creo que, entre tantas cosas que quiso contar, la historia se quedó sin un hilo conductor y terminó diluyéndose. Me gusta cómo plantea las complejidades en la relación URSS-Occidente y cómo se fue gestando la desconfianza mutua que caracterizó al periodo de posguerra. Me hubiera gustado ver más historias a profundidad concentradas en un menor número de protagonistas. Irónicamente, siento que el Hotel Metropol tiene muy poco protagonismo en el libro y apenas tenemos algunos atisbos de cómo era la vida de la gente que vivía y trabajaba ahí.

[Jeff Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling story about the men (and some women) who served as war time correspondents in Moscow during WWII. We learn the details of how they were mostly willing pawns (or, more aptly, useful idiots) in Stalin's propaganda war. The real victims are the Russian translators who are used by everyone and then tossed in the trash like yesterday's leftover fish.

Don't skip the last chapter! Learning the fate of these people added perspective and poignancy.

[Andy Kabanoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have pointed out the book needed much better editing, including some restructuring of the sequence of accounts - but, particularly towards the end, it became a gripping account of the Stalin years, the interrogations, the gulags. . . It's been decades since I've read Solzhenitsyn so this was a potent reminder of his first-hand experiences. Having many relatives now living in Putin's Russia this had particular relevance for me.

[Nasus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting; the first half really focused on the details and activities of the journalists & their interpreters. The 2d half focused more on what happened post 1941 and post war, sometimes going into details about people/events that were unfamiliar to the reader (from first half of book). Focusing on the aftermath felt by the interpreters left behind in Russia after the journalists went back to the safety of their home countries was very compelling.

[gabrielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre m’a beaucoup intéressée car l’auteur essaye d’y voir clair dans une époque très confuse de la II GM en Russie. Avoir choisi l’hôtel Métropole comme point de départ et de référence est une très bonne option pour nous présenter et expliquer le travail des journalistes étrangers à Moscou, avec les secrétaires traductrices qui veillaient à l’application scrupuleuse de la censure de Staline. Propagande déguisée ou vérités camouflées ? A lire absolument !

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating & devastating in equal measure. Perhaps no other book I've read in some considerable time has come this close to effectively showing how the blinders of Stalin's Soviet state were lifted from the eyes of visitors, citizens, and even the most passionate true believers. Pointed lessons from the past that are brought up to the date in the book's conclusion. Superb work.

[Michael Conway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read mostly about an old Moscow, still in use today, was used during WW II as a haven for foreign journalists and spies looking for any scrap of secretive Soviet government information. Centers on British journalists/some spies and Russian women interpretors/some spies/some wives. Behind the scenes look at NKVD secret police tactics and Gulag prisoner camps.

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I don't think that this book breaks any new ground, but the stories of ordinary Russians trying to navigate the minefield of Stalin"s Great Terror were compelling. This account should serve as yet another warning against allowing authoritarian governments to take hold.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tells the story of the Soviet Unions efforts to control the Western press during WW2. Many of the journalists were compliant in Stalins efforts to control the news. An interesting story although told in a bit of a disjointed fashion.

[Kdjane · Rating 5 out of 5]

TODAY 2025

We are seeing the repetition today. A sad reflection on human nature and our inability to see the insignificance of the human race compared to the immeasurable value of the planet.