Literature Opinion

Red Hotel a historic example of the war on journalistic truth

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Details of the disinformation war conducted by Joseph Stalin mirror the modern-day stifling of press freedom in times of war. Jim Kable reviews a fascinating new book by journalist and Russia expert Alan Philps.

WHILE READING The Red Hotel (The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War), I was travelling through Viet Nam and Cambodia, pondering over the lies and disinformation fed to a much younger and naïve me and everyone else during the American War of the 1960s and 1970s, from jingoistic U.S. propaganda until My Lai and other aspects of the true nature of the U.S. war there began to filter through.

No plucky little South Viet Nam fighting a separate and big bad North, but an imperial U.S., bombing into neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. And Agent Orange, the effects of which are now passed down to third generations.

The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels and in Cambodia, the mine clearance programs still ongoing across the country - the Killing Fields of the Pol Pot regime; S-21; and the Tuol Sleng Genocide/Torture Centre in Phnom Penh – were all directly made possible by the U.S. bombing signed off for by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and written most movingly and recently about by Nick Turse.

Nothing stands alone. Our own experiences, places visited, books read and the people affecting, causing or commenting on any of those things all are layers from which we can extract meaning and understanding. And it often takes time and revelation of unopened files or interviews with people long ignored in order to properly understand all the contexts and truths.

Alan Philps outlines how his book morphed from telling the tales of the 50 or so foreign journalists/Allied reporters in the Metropol Hotel (including the Australian Godfrey Blunden of the Sydney Daily Telegraph), kept from the battlefront, reports controlled via stringent censorship, a visa regime favouring compliant journalists, a ban on unsupervised travel and on contact with Soviet citizens – and its stifling nature – to a focus on the female Soviet translators, the true heroes of those times, he states.

These were the eyes and ears of the visiting journalists and some of whom contrived to reveal the truth of life under Stalin. The story covers the period from mid-1941 through the war and into the post-war period. It’s a gripping tale and Philps tells it well.

Philps started as a trainee journalist for Reuters in Moscow in 1979 and remained a foreign correspondent for more than 20 years — writer, editor and journalist. He studied Russian at school, then Arabic and Farsi (Persian) at Oxford. While he adopts a somewhat ideological attitude towards contemporary Russia concerning Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny – and his assessments of the current situation in Ukraine, backed up with references to Bellingcat – for example, he nevertheless writes a gripping story of the foreign correspondents.

For the most part, they are holed up within the Hotel Metropol confines, “reporting" on the war to their newspapers back in the U.S., the UK and Australia — free from having been on its front lines, their information filtered via their Russian (and Russian-speaking) assistants and via official reports coming from the government. Of course, this was designed to extract funding from the Allies.

I am, not unnaturally, reminded of the current situation in Ukraine under the Zelenskiy regime — foreign correspondents I observe, from the ABC, no less, nowhere near the front lines and reporting what they are told. And if near military equipment, it is most definitely not at the front, but designed via their reporting to extract more donations – money and matériel – from their various governments. (More Bushmasters, please! Or, Hey, your government is in record budget surplus – thanks to our war – send some of that to us!)

The setting of The Red Hotel also resonated on a personal level.

In early July 1976, my wife and I arrived by train from Nakhodka in south-eastern Siberia and on to Khabarovsk, and from there via Irkutsk/Lake Baikal on the Trans-Siberian Railway into Moscow. It was a pretty amazing journey and the impressions remain — of the landscape and the cities of exile. 

Equally impressive were the Pushkin Theatre Co on tour in Khabarovsk and the Ukrainian Musical Theatre in Irkutsk, the Kirov Ballet Co at the Bolshoi, Circus Karandash and its droll signature clown — and the friendship of ordinary people along the way. And occasionally, people met along the way from Australia. One elderly woman of 80 was travelling alone with her jar of Vegemite, telling us she had booked already to return to do the same journey in winter.

Then there were those in Moscow, there to meet up with relatives from distant Soviet Republics (such as Pola Deery from East St Kilda — with a grandson) or for other sightseeing purposes. Included were a journalist couple from Surry Hills in Sydney. The woman’s name was Pat Dayman. They invited us to share lunch with them in the Hotel Metropol atrium, a vast interior section beneath an extraordinarily high, wide glass ceiling. 

In those days, no matter where one travelled or dined across the USSR – on the train or in a restaurant – the exact same menu was proffered. And among the many dishes printed, only a few (marked) would actually be available. So we ate and afterwards were invited up to admire their super-deluxe accommodation. It was an apartment from Tsarist times, the bathroom itself larger than our entire first-class room – including the bathroom – at the 6,000-bed Hotel Rossiya which then lay just below St Basils beyond Red Square.

This had clearly been the apartment of significant personages. It was high-ceilinged and parquet-floored. The furnishings would not have been out-of-place in any of the grand houses of the National Trust or of British Heritage — the curtains, cabinets, vases and artwork. And to top it all, from the tall window was a direct view of the Bolshoi Theatre to which we had just been for a performance of the Kirov Ballet company down from Leningrad (now again St Petersburg) and seated next to some people visiting from Georgia.

My research seems to indicate that this room could be a favourite of the St Petersburg ballet star Diana Vishneva (born around the time we were in Moscow, in fact, or while passing the outskirts of Leningrad on our way to Helsinki) when in Moscow to appear at the Bolshoi. We were, all four of us, impressed by the scale of the apartment. Of course in those Intourist days when no one made their own booking, accommodation levels were allocated. And charged accordingly. A teacher couple — first class at the Rossiya; a journalist couple — super deluxe at the Hotel Metropol! 

Constructed during the years 1899 till it opened in 1905, this is the same hotel that features in Amor Towles’ 2016 fictional novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. And over the years, people of note including Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald, Michael Jackson and Sophia Loren, to name just a few, have stayed here.

The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin's Disinformation War is available from Hachette Publishing for $34.99 (RRP) paperback.

This book was reviewed by an IA Book Club member. If you would like to receive free high-quality books and have your review published on IA, subscribe to Independent Australia for your complimentary IA Book Club membership.

Jim Kable is a retired teacher who taught in rural and metropolitan NSW, in Europe and later, long-term in Japan. He is also a member of the steering committee of political party The New Liberals.

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