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

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. (July)