The Pushkin Club invites you to the presentation of the new book by Alan Philps: The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War. The author reveals how the Soviet leader transformed his wartime image from blood-soaked dictator to cuddly “Uncle Joe”. The book tells the story of Stalin’s wartime propaganda campaign though the experience of foreign journalists and their Soviet translators who lived and worked in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.
The Anglo-American correspondents based in Moscow were subjected to unbending censorship and deprived of the chance to visit the frontlines of battle or to meet ordinary citizens. The Metropol Hotel where they lived and worked was a gilded cage: the reporters enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and a choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds, but no chance to file a proper news story. On the surface, this regime served Stalin well: his plans to control Eastern Europe as a Sovietised “outer empire” were never reported and outrageous Soviet lies went unchallenged.
But beneath the surface, the Metropol was a nest of intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into 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. Eighty years on, when Vladimir Putin is waging war on Ukraine to follow Stalin in expanding Russia’s borders, the danger of lies being allowed to go unchecked is more relevant than ever.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Alan Philps first worked in Moscow in 1979–80 as a Reuters trainee correspondent, returning in 1985 at the start of the Gorbachev era. He was ordered to leave in September of the same year in retaliation for Margaret Thatcher’s expulsion from London of 25 alleged Soviet spies. After joining the foreign staff of The Daily Telegraph, he returned to Russia as the Moscow correspondent from 1994–98, then moved to Jerusalem as the Middle East correspondent to cover the Second Intifada, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the US invasion of Iraq. He returned to London to be The Telegraph’s foreign editor in 2003. In 2006 he helped to start The National, an English language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, and in 2011 he was hired by Chatham House to re-launch its bi-monthly magazine, The World Today. He has written two books on Russian themes: The Boy from Baby House 10 (2009, St. Martin’s Press), about abandoned children and international adoption, and The Red Hotel, published in April 2023 by Headline Publishing Group, which tells the story of Stalin’s wartime propaganda campaign though the experience of foreign journalists and their Soviet translators who lived and worked in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.