Stalin really knew how to lock a country down. Western intelligence services had virtually no secret information sources in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, in contrast to the Soviets’ striking success with Kim Philby, the mole who held a senior position in British intelligence. Western diplomats in Moscow had no direct contacts with members of the Russian population, other than the various watchful helpers supplied by the state. During the war, there were no foreign tourists or visiting businessmen in the country, and just a few Western journalists. The journalists lived together in the Hotel Metropole in the centre of Moscow (the Red Hotel of the title of Alan Philps’s new book), drinking and lamenting the strictness of Soviet censorship and their inability to cover the war except from official handouts.

The Metropole was (and is) a grand though somewhat shabby art deco building in the centre of Moscow, across the road from the Bolshoi Theatre. Its restaurant and bar were more or less off limits to all but specially chosen Russians in the 1940s. The journalists lived there in moderate discomfort (though enormous privilege, compared to ordinary Russians), socialising with each other and the diplomats, waiting for briefings from the much-disliked Nikolai Palgunov, head of the Press Department. On rare occasions, they would be taken, en masse, to a carefully curated war site. The Katyn Forest, site of the massacre of Polish officers, was one such expedition; and the journalists later duly reported the (false) Soviet claim that the Germans were responsible, however fishy it sounded, for want of any other story to file.