The Red Hotel

May 22, 2023
In this riveting chronicle, former Reuters Moscow correspondent Philips (The Boy from Baby House 10) recounts how Western reporters flocked to the Soviet city to cover Russia’s clash with Nazi invaders. Sequestered in the gloomy, seen-better-days Metropol Hotel, foreign journalists were forbidden to travel to the front lines. Churchill—himself a former war correspondent—had pressured Stalin to accept the foreign press, but once installed in the Metropol, journalists faced draconian censorship. The correspondents were unhappy about “being offered hospitality instead of the chance to do any real reporting,” but many stayed. As a result, Philips writes, “Stalin was able to suppress all negative coverage of the Soviet Union—in part thanks to the complicity of the press.” Even after they’d returned home, most of the reporters kept to a “journalistic code of omerta,” refusing to reveal the censorship that had taken place and call into question their own integrity. Quoting extensively from wartime and postwar memoirs of Western and Russian participants, Philips draws incisive comparisons to current Russian disinformation campaigns, including Putin’s insistence on refering to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a “special operation.” This exhilarating history has noteworthy implications for the present.

April 15, 2023
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.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.