Moscow’s Metropol Hotel served as a ‘gilded cage’ for Western journalists

When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the USSR and Britain became instant, if unlikely, allies. Relations between the two nations had been frosty: After World War I, Britain sent combat troops to Russia to fight the Soviets during the Russian Civil War. 

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had publicly denounced the Soviet Union for a long time, but he needed Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s armies to take some of the pressure off British forces. Churchill had to build public