the Chatham House magazine. His book The Boy from Baby House 10 captured the mood of Russia in the 1990s through the experience of an abandoned child. It has been translated into five languages, turned into an NBC documentary and the film rights are currently optioned by Footprint Films.
Philps applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War, and reported the following:
Page 99 covers the last evening of an organised press trip ‘to the Smolensk Front’ for the American and British journalists in Moscow. It turned out to be more of a kindergarten crocodile than a snapshot of the Red Army’s fight against the Nazi invader. The journalists never got to the front or heard a shot fired in anger, but they did enjoy nightly banquets with heaps of caviar, dishes of quails in sour cream, delicately wrapped chocolates and gallons of vodka.Visit Alan Philps's website.
Vernon Bartlett, the senior member of the press pack, has worked out that these delicacies were not an indication of the logistical prowess of the Red Army but had been secretly brought from Moscow in one of the press pack’s cars. Bartlett is itching to tell his hosts that the journalists would rather have eaten buckwheat groats and rye bread with the soldiers, but he holds his tongue.
‘This was not the moment to point out that sharing the officers’ usual rations would have suited the guests better than the Potemkin banquets that had been set before them. As required, he gave fulsome thanks to the Red Army for their hospitality, and proposed toasts to the flourishing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance.’
The only woman reporter, the British communist Charlotte Haldane, has come to Moscow full of passion to record the exploits of the heroic Red Army under Stalin’s wise leadership. But she is unnerved by the sight of a procession of starving peasants dressed in rags. They must be collaborators, she thinks, being punished for working with the Germans. A Red army officer puts her right: ‘They were peasants who were still resisting collectivisation, putting their energies into the tiny family plots they were allowed to keep and grudgingly giving to the collective the minimum of labour they would get away with.’ This was a very different view of Soviet agriculture from the images of apple-cheeked peasant women clutching abundant sheaves of wheat that she had seen in the pages of the Daily Worker.
Page 99 marks a crucial stage in the correspondents’ realisation that they are being duped and manipulated to present a sanitized version of Stalin’s Russia. It is a pivotal moment in the narrative. A browser who had read the book cover and then turned to page 99 would nod and think: yes, this is what I was expecting. In that respect, the Page 99 test applies to this book. But would this browser be inspired to buy the book by the words on page 99? I’m not sure. There are other passages where the moral dilemmas and unheroic compromises of the correspondents are presented more starkly and with more pathos, pages where the browser would not just nod, but exclaim: ‘I hadn’t expected that! This is a book I must buy.’
One strand of the book absent from page 99 is the role of the visiting correspondents’ Soviet ‘secretary-translators’, the women on whom the reporters – almost all men – relied for real news, companionship and a lot more. The Metropol Hotel in Moscow, where the journalists lived, worked and downed their vodka, was a magical island in the grim greyness of Stalin’s Russia, where fraternisation between westerners and Soviet women was tolerated, even encouraged, by Stalin’s secret police. The relationships that sprang up, and the price paid by some of the brave translators for sharing forbidden secrets, these are the elements that provide the book’s narrative drive and that I would have liked the browser to stumble upon.
The Page 99 Test: The Boy from Baby House 10.
--Marshal Zeringue
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