The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War

Called a 'riveting study' by the Daily Telegraph and 'a compelling tale' by the Economist, The Red Hotel tells the story of forgotten correspondents and translators in Stalin's Russia and the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel.

Reporters. Translators. Lovers. Spies.

In THE RED HOTEL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF STALIN'S PROPAGANDA WAR, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russia expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. War correspondents were both bullied and pampered in the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and to share their beds.

While some of these translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were brave secret dissenters who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Through the use of British archives and Russian sources, the story of the role of the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with is told for the first time. This revelatory story will finally lift the lid on Stalin's operation to muzzle and control what the Western allies' writers and foreign correspondents knew of his regime's policies to prosecute the war against Hitler's rampaging armies from June 1941 onwards.

Review

A riveting trip down the corridors of Soviet deception . . .Philps' book is almost faultlessly balanced between racy narrative and historical analysis ― Sunday Telegraph

A fabulous book, packed with untold stories, written with the lyrical empathy of an author who knows and feels his subject deeply -- Patrick Bishop

The Red Hotel is a sizzling read full of bitchiness and high jinks. But it is also a deeply moral book, outlining a simple truth: that the press pack abroad often operates in a bubble and is deeply dependent on local translators and fixers. Philps has an eye for detail and a heart for those left behind as the press caravan moved on ― The Times

Philps adroitly uses the experiences of the wartime correspondents incarcerated in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow to tell at least part of the story of Stalin's campaign to dupe the West about the nature of his regime ... The Red Hotel gives a superb flavour of the compromises, betrayals and self-delusions require to report on the USSR ― Literary Review

Philps's book vindicates the value of truth, most of all by depicting the lengths that a rare few will go to share it ― Washington Post

Philps is terrific at training a spotlight on the local staff who are so often forgotten, and exposing the moral ambiguities of journalists ― Spectator

The Red Hotel is a compelling and often horrifying tale of moral degradation and occasional heroism superbly told by a seasoned reporter ― Economist

Balanced between racy detail and historical analysis...a riveting study ― Daily Telegraph

An engaging and insightful account...an experienced and accomplished foreign correspondent himself, Philps does an excellent job of recreating a sense of time and place ― History Today

About the Author

Alan Philps is a fluent Russian speaker, who has worked as a reporter in Moscow on and off since he was the Reuters trainee there in 1979 - in the Brezhnev era when the system of isolating correspondents from the local people, except for some authorised ballet dancers and such like, was very much still in place. As a senior reporter, he worked there in the 1980s under leaders Mikhail Gorbachev, and the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. Alan has kept up a connection with the Metropol Hotel, staying there several times to attend charity balls.