Nocturnal escapades

The origin of Amor Towles’s novel, ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’, lies in a challenge the author set himself: to write a novel in which the hero spends his whole life confined to a hotel. Of all the hotels in all the cities of the world, which would be the best setting for the novel? For lovers of Russian literature, the first choice might be the Montreux Palace Hotel in which Vladimir Nabokov spent 16 years, writing at a lectern overlooking Lake Geneva.

Or perhaps the Ritz in Paris? Coco Chanel lived there for many years, in the 1930s and during the second world war when it was frequented by Nazi officers.  At the end of the war she decamped to Switzerland until the accusations against her of collaboration died down, and then returned to the Ritz and lived there until her death in 1971.

Among the New York hotels, the Algonquin – the lunchtime haunt of the literary Round Table founded by the writer and wit Dorothy Parker – might have fitted the bill. But none of these hotels would have provided the backdrop of Russia’s turbulent 20^th century history from which Towles artfully selects incidents to add drama and pathos to his story.

Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov, with his ward Sofia, played by Beau Gadson, in A Gentleman in Moscow (image: Paramount+)

So it had to be Moscow, and where else but the Metropol Hotel which had been at the centre of Russian political and social life under tsars and commissars alike? The de-luxe hotel portrayed by Towles has little in common with the Metropol I got to know  while researching my book, ‘The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War’. For long periods during the 20^th century, the hotel was a shabby ghost of the glitzy esta'blishment that opened in 1905. ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ is of course a work of fiction, so the writer has to be forgiven for some artistic licence. Episode 6 of the TV adaptation provides examples of the difference between reality and fantasy.  

In this episode Count Alexander Rostov, who is confined to the Metropol by order of a Soviet revolutionary court, has to deal with a medical emergency: his teenage ward Sofia trips and falls on the back stairs of the hotel, and he needs to rush her to hospital.  For the first time in 25 years, with Sofia in his arms, the count runs out through the swing doors onto the now unfamiliar streets of Moscow and hails a taxi. The count does this in the full knowledge that he is violating the terms of his imprisonment: if discovered he will be deported to Siberia. This is the jeopardy that drives the plot.

If you have not seen this episode yet, stop reading now: there will be spoilers. For me, the count’s nocturnal escapade reminded me of a real incident that happened in the Metropol in wartime, also under cover of darkness.

From 1941-45, the Metropol was home to a small Anglo-American press corps whose members were pretty much confined to the Metropol: they could stretch their legs on Red Square, but they were not allowed to meet or talk to any Soviet citizens without official approval, and they certainly could not travel outside the city and were kept well away from the front line. Some of them lapsed into vodka-dulled passivity, relying on their secretary-translators – as their Soviet assistants were known – to pamper them with comforts beyond the dreams of war correspondents on other fronts.  In return, the starving women got crumbs from the reporters’ tables. 

Edgar Snow, an enterprising American journalist, was shocked on arrival in Moscow at his colleagues’ passivity. He confided to his diary:

‘Many correspondents do not leave the hotel for weeks in winter but rely on secretaries and newspapers. Secretary orders breakfast in the morning, arranges pillow under your head while you eat it, shops for cigarettes and vodka, translates, interprets, teaches you Russian and sometimes goes to bed with you. In exchange the correspondent brings back titbits from the dining room – bread, cake, cheese, and meat. It’s a daily event to see correspondents trooping up to their rooms with a plateful of bread and cheese.’

One of the more ambitious reporters, an Australian named Godfrey Blunden, spent his time in Moscow secretly gathering material for a book that would tell the real story of life in Moscow – a story full of revelations that could never pass the censor – and cement his reputation as a serious writer. For local colour he needed more than anything to visit a typical Soviet family home. Blunden persuaded his translator Nadya Ulanovskaya (I have mentioned her in previous posts) to find a suitable home to visit. This was breaking two cardinal rules imposed on the press corps: meeting Soviet citizens without official approval and seeing the cramped living conditions where Muscovites lived eight to a room and 20 households shared one toilet.

Nadya met the heavily disguised Blunden outside the Metropol and guided him through the blackout to a block of flats where he lurked on a darkened landing while Nadya negotiated their entry into a communal apartment. They entered a tiny room, home to two old ladies whose husbands, a lawyer and a fur trader, had both been arrested as members of the old ruling class. They had disappeared into the Gulag never to be heard of again.

The room was just big enough for a single bed, which the two women shared, and a small table, two chairs and little woodburning stove against the wall. Blunden was shocked to discover that the two women survived on the little money they made by knitting sweaters and making buttons to sell in the market.

Nadya and Blunden slipped back into the Metropol just before the midnight curfew. It seemed they had outwitted the secret police. As Blunden was leaving Moscow, Nadya warned him: ‘Don’t forget that this book you are writing could  have bad consequences for us Russians.’ He reassured her that his book was going to be a novel.  

As it turned out, his night-time visit to the home of the old ladies became a key element of the plot of novel. And what’s more he failed to disguise adequately the identities of the two women. The secret police tracked them down and forced one to denounce the other.  On the basis of that information, Nadya was herself arrested and sent to a forced labour camp in the Arctic. This was the result of a real-life nocturnal escapade from the Metropol.

As for the fictional count, he emerges unscathed from his nocturnal escapade. After delivering the injured Sofia to a surgeon, he sneaks back into the hotel disguised as a bread delivery man, magically avoiding being spotted by the secret police searching high and low for him. The hotel staff and residents provide the count with an alibi, and deny ever seeing him leave the hotel. Thus he is spared a journey to Siberia

This of course is utterly unrealistic: after more than 20 years of Stalin’s terror the police would definitely have found a willing informant to denounce the count’s accomplices and reap the rewards of being a rat. In the Stalin era there were no miraculous escapes. Even in the Metropol, which managed in many small ways to avoid being fully Sovietised by the communists, the secret police were king. Alas, happy endings in that era belong in the world of fiction.

An eight-part TV adaptation of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ is available for streaming on Paramount+.  Alan Philps’s book about the Metropol Hotel, ‘The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War’, is now in paperback in the UK  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Hotel-Untold-Stalins-Disinformation/dp/1035401339/ref=monarch_sidesheet