Originally published on August 28, 2023 (Episode 331)
Introduction
Between 1941 and 1945, the Metropol Hotel in Moscow became home to a platoon of Anglo-American reporters—joined by a few Canadians and Australians—tasked with covering the Soviet Union’s defense against Nazi Germany. To Stalin’s regime, they were both a necessity and a threat: useful conveyors of carefully managed stories for Western audiences, yet dangerous enough to require constant surveillance.
The Metropol was the perfect stage for this dance. Reporters were watched, shepherded, and limited in what they could see. Translators and “guides” were often intelligence operatives, delivering propaganda through journalists to the outside world. Yet not all these servants of the state complied with their instructions: some quietly whispered the realities of everyday Soviet life. Over time, a few reporters dramatically reversed the views they brought to Moscow, while others drifted into complicity and complacency.
Alan Philps captures this extraordinary world in Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War (Pegasus, 2023). In our conversation, we explore the mixture of control and subterfuge, the precarious line between truth and lies, and how the experiences of those years illuminate the challenges of reporting under authoritarianism.
About the Guest
Alan Philps was Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph. He later became foreign editor of the Telegraph and served as editor of The World Today, the journal of Chatham House.
For Further Investigation
Alan Philps, Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War (Pegasus, 2023)
Nadezhda Ulanovskaya in conversation with William F. Buckley
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (Columbia, 2022)
Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge, 2009)
💬 Listen & Discuss
How should we judge journalists who reported under strict surveillance in Stalin’s Moscow? Were they collaborators, victims of control, or something in between? Share your thoughts in the comments, and pass this episode along to someone interested in propaganda, war reporting, and the Soviet Union.
