‘The Red Hotel’ Review: The Concierge Was a Communist

The detention of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich by the Russian government is a reminder of how hazardous distant postings can be in the midst of war—how vulnerable reporters are to the whims of a foreign power. In “The Red Hotel,” Alan Philps takes us to Russia in the midst of World War II, when Stalin imposed extraordinary restrictions on dozens of Western journalists who had been dispatched to Moscow to cover, as he puts it, “the titanic struggle between the then undefeated divisions of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Stalin’s largely peasant army whose officer class had been shredded in the purges of the 1930s.”

Though by now a Western ally, Stalin had not been keen on playing host to the Western press, Mr. Philps tells us. But Winston Churchill, a former war correspondent himself, had persuaded him to allow British, Australian and American reporters to be posted to Russia. The dispatches they filed, he believed, would include vivid accounts from the Eastern Front that would help persuade the Western public to support sending more military assistance to the beleaguered Red Army.

Once in Moscow, however, the correspondents found themselves operating under strict controls—unable to visit the Eastern Front, unable to interview either soldiers or ordinary citizens, and heavily dependent on the young female secretary-translators who were assigned to them. Ensconced in the once-elegant Metropol Hotel at the center of the city—built several years before the Revolution—the correspondents were limited to repeating whatever updates their Soviet minders provided them.

In the meantime, their secretary-translators kept tabs on them on behalf of the Kremlin’s secret police and were often expected to compromise the Westerners by offering them sexual favors. But not everything unfolded according to Stalin’s plans. At least some of these young women—though in need of the wartime assignment simply to have access to adequate food and warm water—were not compliant agents. They “contrived, at huge personal risk, to reveal the truth about life under Stalin,” Mr. Philps writes.

The story of one of these women, Nadya Ulanovskaya, is at the heart of “The Red Hotel.” Born into a poor Jewish family in Ukraine, Nadya had joined the Bolsheviks as a teenager during the Russian Civil War and had gone on to a career as a Soviet spy in China, Germany and America, where she and her husband had worked with Whittaker Chambers in a clandestine espionage ring in the 1930s. At the Metropol, she was assigned to an Australian journalist named Godfrey Blunden. She not only began to speak candidly with him about her own disillusionment with Stalin but also arranged for him to visit two impoverished women who were sharing a room in a communal Moscow apartment—an unheard of opportunity at a time when Western journalists were forbidden to learn about Soviet life firsthand.

Mr. Philps, a veteran British journalist who for years reported from Moscow, conveys Nadya’s story in stirring detail, both her improbable adventures before World War II and the ordeals she experienced in the Gulag after her arrest in 1948, when Soviet authorities accused her of revealing state secrets to Blunden. Following Stalin’s death, she gained her release and returned to Moscow in 1956. She and her husband, together with their grown daughter, became active in the Soviet dissident movement in the late 1960s and were able to leave for Israel in 1973 in the first wave of an exodus that, over time, would bring millions of Soviet emigres to Israel and the West.

Tanya Svetlova, another compelling figure in “The Red Hotel,” was assigned to work with Ronald Matthews, “an eccentric British correspondent.” (He had a habit, Mr. Philps says, of “keeping a tube of toothpaste in his breast pocket and sucking on it, occasionally at parties offering fellow guests a suck as if it were a hipflask of whisky.”) They became lovers and married and, in an altogether unexpected concession from the Kremlin, were permitted to leave for England in 1945. Tanya went on to a distinguished career working for the BBC in North Africa. Her books “Russian Child and Russian Wife” (1949) and “Russian Wife Goes West” (1955) are among the many estimable, if now largely forgotten, memoirs that Mr. Philps uses to good effect.

Alice-Leone Moats was an intrepid American journalist who finagled an assignment to Moscow for Collier’s magazine and refused to leave even when the American ambassador insisted that Moscow was no place for a single woman during the war. Her book “Blind Date With Mars,” cited by Mr. Philps, came out in 1943. Then there is Charlotte Haldane, a British journalist and the estranged wife of the distinguished scientist J.B.S. Haldane. Mr. Philps reminds us that her memoirs, “Russian Newsreel” (1942) and “Truth Will Out” (1949), deserve to be recalled as part of the testimony of this difficult and disheartening era. Haldane and her husband had been stalwart members of the British Communist Party, but her time in Moscow eroded her faith.

For all his thoroughness, Mr. Philps doesn’t include the American correspondent Henry Shapiro in his story. It is true that Shapiro had begun reporting from Moscow in 1933 and was already an established journalist by the time of Hitler’s invasion in June 1941—and thus may not perfectly fit in Mr. Philps’s framework. But his work during the war deserves to be remembered. He covered the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in 1942 and later scooped other reporters over the death of Stalin in 1953.

Mr. Philps assumes that many readers back in England and America were readily taken in by the force-fed reporting coming out of Moscow. By 1941, though, writers like George Orwell, André Gide, Eugene Lyons and Arthur Koestler had published books that exposed the duplicity and violence at the heart of the Soviet regime. Stalin’s tight control of what could be reported—whether from the Metropol or elsewhere—didn’t fool everyone.

Mr. Rubenstein’s most recent book is “The Last Days of Stalin.”