Culture | Rotten reporting on Russia

How Stalin’s scribbling stooges tricked Western readers

A new book shows how journalists failed to capture Russia’s horrors

Photographers at the Big Four conference in Moscow in 1947 — Stalin’s stoogesImage: Getty Images

Jul 27th 2023

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Winston Churchill persuaded Josef Stalin to let a posse of British and American journalists come to reside in Moscow to tell the Western world about the communists’ bravery in fending off the Nazis. More than a dozen scribes found themselves corralled within the Metropol Hotel, a huge art-nouveau edifice just off Red Square in Moscow, which already housed a motley group of Stalinist spies and prostitutes. (The hotel remains open today but with a different clientele.)

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “News you can’t use”