The Red Hotel

The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War

By Alan Philps

Published by Headline; Dist. by Hachette
RRP $34.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781035401314

A review of this book in The Washington Post (Paul Musgrave, 3 July 2023) carries the headline, ‘How Stalin manipulated the Western press during WWII’. I was immediately struck by contemporary parallels of alleged Russian interference in western democracies. A long established practice, it seems, except now the methods are somewhat easier to access.

In this book, Russia expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin sought to create 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.

One of these reporters was an ambitious Australian journalist working for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Godfrey Blunden. One chilling report he filed was titled ‘Nazis used Ukraine as a Slave State’.

None of the reporters however were free to report the ferocity with which Stalin had begun crushing the Ukrainian nationalists who were bitterly opposed to the reimposition of Soviet rule.

This book is, without doubt, a compelling and thoroughly readable account of Stalin’s Russia. As Western allies, they fought the Nazis, all the while imposing a brutal regime on their own people.

Russia fascinated many of the journalists who jumped at the opportunity to take up the posting; what they found out, even if they could not report it, would have been a great disillusionment.

VERDICT: Against contemporary events, this book offers a resounding and disturbing echo from the past.