The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 — the apparent pivot of the war — seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for Western reporters. By hook or by crook some great talents persuaded editors to send them to Moscow, some eyeing future book contracts, others wedded to the idea that only Stalin’s new Russia could beat Fascism. Alan Philps draws on archives, interviews and largely forgotten memoirs to make a jaunty book out of the Anglo-American press at war. The Red Hotel, as one would suspect, is a sizzling read full of bitchiness and high jinks.
But it is also a deeply moral book, outlining a simple truth: that the press pack abroad often operates in a bubble and is deeply dependent on local translators and fixers. Philps, once an elegant Daily Telegraph reporter from Moscow, has an eye for detail (the black flakes of documents being burned before evacuation of the capital, the clicking of abacuses as panicked guests settle their hotel bills). And he has a heart for those left behind as the press caravan moved on. In Stalin’s Russia many of the left-behind women ended up with broken lives. Then, as now, the correspondent went home while the assistant was left to deal with the aftermath of an expulsion, the suspicion of having betrayed secrets to the enemy. Some ended their lives in the Gulag.
By September 1941 the reporters, typically holed up in Moscow’s faded but still grandish Metropol hotel, were screaming with frustration: Stalin wouldn’t allow them anywhere near the front. Their editors at home wanted gripping reports about plucky war heroes and had to make do instead with heavily censored stories lifted from the Soviet press.
Then came a breakthrough: Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate who served as Churchill’s minister of supply, and the tycoon Averell Harriman were set to confirm to Stalin at a Moscow conference how many aircraft, tanks and tons of ammo and food the Western allies were going to hand over to the Red Army. Suddenly, Stalin needed glowing copy from the Anglo-American press corps to big up the Soviet war effort.
The Red Hotel is a deeply moral book, outlining a simple truth: that the press pack abroad often operates in a bubble and is deeply dependent on local translators and fixers.
A difficult task when the Germans were surging toward Moscow. And doubly difficult when ordinary Muscovites, still smarting from the purge and spy-phobia of the 1930s, were terrified of talking to foreign journalists. When the celebrated American reporter Edgar Snow slipped on the pavement of Gorky Street, he accepted the helping hand of a passerby who fled as soon as he heard Snow’s accent. The American decided to turn the event into copy: “For the first time in Moscow I met an ordinary Russian. As soon as I opened my mouth, he ran away.” The Soviet censor didn’t let it through.
Stalin’s propaganda team thought they knew how to get some positive war coverage out of the Western hacks and simultaneously keep them under control — take them on a six-day jolly near the Smolensk front where the Red Army had just enjoyed a brief and rare success in driving the Germans back. The more experienced correspondents knew this would be a trial-by-vodka since the surest way of keeping foreign journalists docile was to ply them with booze. Red Army hospitality invariably involved heavy drinking at the table of officers. For the NKVD secret police it meant creating a charade of well-fed apple-cheeked peasants offered up to distracted, preferably drunk journalists who could be conned into writing positive copy.
Potemkin banquets of roast woodcock and caviar — all transported to rural hovels by the NKVD — were laid on for the visitors. When a German spotter plane passed overhead, they were led to a frontline dugout that just happened to be furnished with a grand piano, cheerful posters and an improbable library of improving books including a collection of Heinrich Heine poems.
The two women in the group — Charlotte Haldane, a left-winger sent by the Daily Sketch, and the war photographer Margaret Bourke-White — were spared the endless toasts (vodka shots chased with Crimean brandy) and for that reason emerged as the only beneficiaries of the Soviet junket. While their male colleagues slept off their hangovers, the women got on with it. Bourke-White, frustrated by the poor light (there had been only 16 minutes of sunlight in the six-day trip) managed to take a striking picture of a disused cathedral where the Germans had confined villagers while setting a village ablaze.
Haldane witnessed almost by accident a silent procession of despairing peasants who had been resisting collectivization. It was an image that was to lead to a crisis in faith and make her question the conviction that the Soviet Union had to be defended through thick and thin. She didn’t breathe a word about it to her colleagues, partly because she thought that they could steal the story, but also because of their unease around her. If anyone could land an interview with Stalin, Haldane’s colleagues figured, it would be someone with proven left-wing sympathies.
Red Army hospitality invariably involved heavy drinking at the table of officers.
The Metropol hotel — which Philps treats almost like an independent character — was more than a hacks’ hangout. It was a news hub, a bubble where correspondents could feel safe among their own. “Many correspondents do not leave the hotel for weeks in winter but rely on secretaries and newspapers,” Snow wrote in a 1942 diary entry quoted by Philps. “Secretary orders breakfast in the morning, arranges pillow under your head while you eat it, shops for cigarettes and vodka, translates, interprets, teaches you Russian and sometimes goes to bed with you.”
In fact, the fixer was always more than that. She was put into place by the NKVD (or if she had somehow wangled a job, would soon be contacted and steered by the spooks) to monitor and control the news flow and report on unauthorized Russian contact with the reporter. Her life would be easier for a while — a warm meal at the Metropol and other perks — but sooner or later she would be stripped of her privileges and sent to the Gulag.
Nadya Ulanovskaya was clear-eyed about the job. She and her husband had worked for Soviet military intelligence abroad, in Shanghai and America, and she knew what she was getting into. But as she steered her correspondents from the Metropol toward the fake Soviet reality, her commitment to the system began to waver. Her last correspondent was an Australian reporter, Godfrey Blunden. Before departing to cover the war elsewhere, he asked Ulanovskaya to take him to a typical Soviet home, not a sham apartment set up by the secret police.
Ulanovskaya found the place of a friend, 40 square feet shared by two women, a fold-up bed in the corner for one of their sons. They told their stories: one woman’s husband, a wealthy Siberian fur trader, had been arrested in the 1930s and her son, a student, had been arrested in 1941. The other woman’s husband had been arrested because of his “bourgeois origins”. The women knitted sweaters and made hats to survive. On leaving the flat Ulanovskaya warned Blunden to be discreet. “There’s no need to be afraid, Nadya,” he said. “It’s going to be a novel.”
The novel, A Room on the Route, appeared in 1947 and was a timely thriller. Much of the action takes place in a tiny flat shared by two women. An assassin uses a window in the flat to try to shoot Stalin on his route from the Kremlin to his dacha. The research was all too obviously based on his visit to Ulanovskaya’s friends. By the time it appeared she was teaching English at the Institute of International Relations in Moscow. She was dismissed without explanation and her phone was cut off. In February 1948 there was a knock on the door. That was the start of a grim odyssey from the Lubyanka to Lefortovo jail to the forced labor camps in the Arctic, shoveling human waste or harnessed to a cart with other female inmates tugging coal. All, it seems, inflicted because of Blunden’s book.
Philps’s richly detailed description of Ulanovskaya’s misery makes the point: when Western journalists build their careers covering dictatorships they don’t take into account the damage they can do to the locals who help them toward the truth. Ulanovskaya was saved by Stalin’s death, not by any Western campaign to get her out of the Gulag. There are obvious parallels to Vladimir Putin’s arbitrary arrests, his use of visa restraints against journalists, Russian state media’s fake news, and the depiction of critics as enemies of the state. Philps doesn’t labor the comparisons, but any reporter who has had to operate in a pack while covering a dictatorship will feel a twinge of recognition, and perhaps of guilt.
Roger Boyes is the diplomatic editor at The Times of London