The Red Hotel

'A riveting study' - Daily Telegraph
'A fabulous book' - Patrick Bishop

Lavish supplies of caviar, the choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds - these were some of the perks enjoyed by foreign correspondents in the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. While some of these translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were brave secret dissenters who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag.


In The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin's Disinformation War, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russia expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war. Using British archives and Russian sources, this revelatory story details the vital role played by the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with, telling their story for the first time.

'Philps' book vindicates the value of truth' - Washington Post
'Engaging and insightful' - History Today