“A Gentleman in Moscow,” Paramount+’s adaptation of the 2016 international best-selling novel by Amor Towles, follows the adventures of a disgraced aristocrat through the turbulent decades following the 1917 Revolution..
The setting of the historical drama is the legendary Metropol Hotel in the Russian capital.
It is there that the protagonist, the noble Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is detained by Russia’s new Bolshevik masters after being denounced as an enemy of the Revolution due to his aristocratic heritage.
Although the count and the decades of house arrest he endures at the Metropol are the work of Towles’ imagination, the setting in which the events unfold is a real hotel, with a history that rivals a work of fiction.
Located near the world-famous Bolshoi Theater and just steps from Red Square and the Kremlin, the Metropol has witnessed some of the most dramatic events in modern Russian history.
Its style is Art Nouveau, and construction began in 1899, financed by the Russian industrialist Savva Mamontov, who conceived the creation of a “palace of the arts” with capacity for 3,000 spectators.
Russian-Scottish architect William Walcot was hired to supervise the project, while artists such as Mikhail Vrubel and Alexander Golovin created the building’s celebrated decoration and facades.
However, Mamontov’s sudden bankruptcy (he was accused of embezzling funds from a railway company and, although later acquitted, faced financial and reputational failure) led to the Petersburg insurance company stepping in to handle the project until completion. .
Consequently, Mamontov’s original concept changed and It was converted into a luxurious hotel with an American cocktail bar and a restaurant, along the lines of the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London..
The Metropol Hotel finally opened its doors in 1905, just as revolutionary upheaval in Russia forced Tsar Nicholas II to give in to constitutional reforms.
The Metropol was one of the first places in Moscow to have facilities such as refrigerators and elevators, and to provide hot water and telephone in its guest suites.
It soon became a magnet for both Russia’s wealthy class and visitors from abroad, on the eve of the First World War.
The role of Metropol in the Revolution
The fall of the Romanov monarchy in the spring of 1917 paved the way for a Provisional Government, which set out to establish a Russian republic.
But the October Revolution of that same year saw Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and proclaim the birth of a new socialist Soviet state.
In Moscow, his opponents took refuge inside the Metropol and fortified it.
But it was in vain.
What followed was a fierce battle between forces loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks, during which the Metropol suffered heavy damage, including broken windows and bullet-scarred walls.
Even during this ordeal, the hotel continued to serve guests, including Tomáš Masaryk, the future founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, who witnessed the maelstrom firsthand.
The aftermath of the street confrontation around the hotel was described by American journalist John Reed, who referenced it in his classic 1919 account of the Bolshevik Revolution, “Ten Days That Shook the World.”
“Desperate fighting had broken out again in Moscow…
“The White Guards [opositores ultraconservadores de los bolcheviques] They occupied the Kremlin and the city center… Soviet artillery was stationed on Skobeliev Square, bombing the City Duma building, the Prefecture and the Metropole Hotel [sic]”.
Red star over the Metropol
In 1918, the Bolsheviks moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow.
Metropol was nationalized and became the base of many Soviet institutions, as well as the home of officials of the nascent regime and their families.
The change was reflected in the new name of the building: Second House of the Soviets (the first was the former National Hotel, not far from the Metropol).
To this day, a majolica frieze along the facade of the Metropol Hotel facing Revolution Square contains a quote from Lenin proclaiming “Only the dictatorship of the proletariat can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital.” .
In fact, the hotel appears in the background of one of the most emblematic photographs of the time, that of Lenin giving a speech in Sverdlov Square (now Theater Square).
After the Revolution in the early 1920s, the Metropol Hotel continued to act as a center for some of the Soviet government’s bodies, as well as offering rooms to guests.
The Bolsheviks’ disdain for bourgeois affectation meant that the building’s lavish interiors soon fell into disrepair from neglect.
Its deterioration reflected the loss of status suffered by members of the Russian aristocracy..
Those who did not flee abroad or go underground lived in a world of shadows under the surveillance of the Checa (the predecessor of the KGB), denounced as “the old ones.”
The fictional Count Rostov from “A Gentleman in Moscow” is one of them.
The main inn of Russia
However, shortly after the Metropol became an integral part of the government’s attempt to gain international recognitionand was increasingly used to entertain foreign diplomats.
As a result, the hotel also acquired the reputation of being an indecent place where lewd relations were permitted.
His famous restaurant was moved under the stained glass ceiling of the Fountain Room.
The spectacular space was the scene of the 1925 international chess tournament, in which the world champion, Cuban José Raúl Capablanca, lost the title to his Soviet opponent, Efim Bogoljubov.
As the 1930s approached, with the Soviet Union in the midst of Josef Stalin’s sweeping industrialization campaign (the First Five-Year Plan), a new chapter in Metropol’s history began.
Soviet apparatchiks (bureaucrats) withdrew.
The hotel became an intrinsic part of the regime’s campaign to attract and impress foreign visitors.
Heady doses of propaganda spread by tour guides from the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (better known by its Russian acronym, VOKS), extolled the glory of the USSR’s socialist system.
Over the next decade, important figures passed through its doors, including the Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw and the British social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
The 1930s were a time of immense suffering, fear, and bloodshed in the Soviet Union. Millions of people starved to death – especially in Ukraine – due to pressure from the Kremlin to collectivize agriculture by converting farms into state property.
The latter part of the decade saw Stalin’s paranoid megalomania manifest itself in trials and purges of his former comrades within the Soviet elite.
The Metropol and the strictly controlled tourist experience ensured that Western luminaries were distracted from this dark side of Stalin’s tyranny..
Not far from the Lubyanka – the infamous headquarters of the secret police agency, the NKVD – the Metropol, like so many other places, was no stranger to the sinister raids of Stalin’s henchmen during those years.
In 1938, one of the greatest contemporary Russian writers, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, was born in the hotel..
Her childhood there was the subject of a 2017 memoir, “The Girl from the Metropol Hotel.”
In “A Gentleman in Moscow” one can notice similarities between Petrushevskaya’s experiences and those of the fictional Nina and Sofia in Towles’ story.
The Second War and the Cold
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin suddenly found himself cooperating with the stubbornly anti-Bolshevik British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
And together with the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year, the allies joined forces to defeat fascism.
During World War II (known as the “Great Patriotic War” in several post-Soviet countries, most notably Russia), The Metropol Hotel became the home of several Allied journalists covering news from the Eastern Frontand they transformed some of its rooms into press offices.
His writings were meticulously scrutinized and censored by Soviet authorities, before being returned to foreign journalists, invariably peppered with corrections that fit the heroic angle demanded by the Kremlin.
After the war, the hotel continued to welcome international visitors.
The American writer John Steinbeck and the war photographer Robert Capa They frequented the Metropol when they embarked on a tour of the USSR to record the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens, which was captured in “A Russian Diary” from 1948.
That same year, Golda Meirfuture prime minister of Israel, settled in Metropol as that nation’s first plenipotentiary minister (ambassador) to the Soviet Union.
In the 1950s, as the Cold War began to heat up, Stalin welcomed the newly established People’s Republic of China into the communist camp.
At a reception attended Stalin and Mao Zedong in the aptly named Red Hall of the Metropol they celebrated the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in early 1950.
After all
After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the beginning of the “Khrushchev thaw,” the Metropol adopted a more sedentary existence.
Its renown meant that it continued to serve as a place of stay in Moscow for notable foreign visitors, including film star Marlene Dietrichin the 1960s.
In the late 1980s, Metropol underwent extensive restoration as the Soviet Union embarked on an experiment in systemic political and economic reforms – perestroika and glasnost – launched by Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1991, work on the hotel was completed just as the USSR collapsed and ceased to exist.
Not so the Metropol, which today continues to welcome its guests and eat cializes his rich and surprising legacy.
* If you want to read “The incredible real history of A Gentleman in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol” on BBC HistoryExtra, Click here.
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