Fact checking historical fiction is almost always a pedantic pursuit.
Any historian could pore over a drama set in their period of expertise and spot anachronisms and errors. But who would care?
Not me anyway.
As far as I’m concerned, writers, directors, video game developers, and so on, should freely spin imagined narratives out of historical facts (so long as they strive to capture some sense of truth).
That said, it is relatively rare for me to encounter a big-budget TV series set in a period and place I have spent years researching.
The new show A Gentleman in Moscow, based on Amor Towles bestselling novel, is one such cultural product.
I know a lot about life inside state-owned hotels in Soviet Moscow during the immediate post-revolutionary years (strangely enough). Given that fact, I figured I could add some context for eager viewers of this well-reviewed show.
Note: I will limit my discussion to the first episode of the show, so there are no spoilers if you have not read the book.
This post is not a needling examination of the accuracy of things like costumes and props but rather an answer to the question: broadly speaking, does A Gentleman in Moscow ring true?
The setting
A Gentleman in Moscow imagines the trials and joys of Count Alexander Rostov, a fictional Russian aristocrat played by Ewan McGregor. When we meet him, Rostov has become a ‘former person’ as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he has decided to remain in Moscow rather than join the ‘White Emigration’. He had initially fled to Paris but decided - for reasons of dramatic tension - to return.
Historically-speaking, some Russian emigres did indeed return to Soviet Russia, such as the ill-fated Prince D. S. Mirskii and the more obscure Eugenie Bouvier.
When we meet him, Count Rostov is a resident in the Hotel Metropol, a giant architectural metaphor for the decaying grandeur of the ancien régime. A real hotel established in 1905, the Metropol has survived more than a century of historical changes. I even once had an overpriced cocktail in the lobby. Poignantly, the Metropol outlasted Moscow’s only branch of Jamie’s Italian, which shared a square with the hotel.
A central conceit of the plot is that Rostov cannot leave the Metropol because he is under house - or rather, hotel - arrest. The Hotel Metropol is therefore a major character in the show.
What real history does this story rely upon as a framework? And where does it deviate from the historical reality?
Hotels of a new type
The setting for this story - not just 1920s Moscow, but more specifically a hotel in 1920s Moscow - ties it to a unique moment in the history of the hospitality industry.
Around 1919, Soviet authorities began to convert several Moscow hotels (including the Metropol and two other hotels known as the Bristol and the Lux) into ‘Houses of the Soviets’.
What did this mean? Essentially, the hotels were now under state control and would no longer function exactly like hotels but as state-managed dormitories. Here, specific categories of ‘guest’ were billeted. The Hotel Lux, for example, became the dormitory of the Communist International (Comintern). Most international radicals who worked for the Comintern stayed in one of its 350 rooms at some point in their careers.
The Metropol, meanwhile, became a more vaunted place where visiting dignitaries stayed and foreign journalists like Eugene Lyons and Walter Duranty lived. Unlike the Lux, which quickly fell into disrepair, the Metropol retained some of its former grandeur and status. Numerous significant congresses and summits were held in the Metropol.
The expropriation of these hotels was designed in part as a solution to a problem that was never resolved: Moscow’s overcrowding.
But the hotels also became experiments in a new way of managing accommodation. Hotel managers were replaced by commissars whose remit included not only the running of the hotel, but its security and internal politics (liaising, for example, between residents and the unionised domestic staff). In the show, meanwhile, the manager of the hotel is a holdover from the pre-revolutionary staff, not a recently installed commissar.
Understandably, this story is not overly-concerned with the administrative bureaucracy that governed Moscow’s major hotels in the early Soviet era. But this background did play a crucial role in determining the atmosphere within these hotels.
Because the real state-run hotels of the 1920s were crowded spaces, to my trained historian’s eyes this fictional Metropol seems far too quite.
This is particularly evident when Count Rostov is placed in his new room. It is a sparse and grey space, silent but for the whisper of a chill draft. A guard tells Rostov (and the audience) that this part of the hotel was once the servant’s quarters until the revolution changed things.
In fact, as historical visitors were often surprised to discover, this was something that the revolution did not change. Hotels with long term residents like the Metropol and the Lux had a large staff of domestic servants to serve the residents. For all the Bolshevik overtures towards women’s liberation, the hotels were gendered spaces, where a domestic staff largely composed of Russian women cleaned, cooked and carried out childcare duties.
If a real aristocrat had been confined to the servants’ quarters of the Metropol, he would have felt his reduction in station even more acutely than our fictional count played by Ewan Jamesovich McGregor. He would have lived beside a cramped corridor filled with working-class women rather than the silent and lonely space we witness in the show.
Multicultural Moscow
A frequent bugbear for tedious right-wing commentators who decide to critique historical drama is that a diverse cast is historically inaccurate.
If anything, A Gentleman in Moscow underplays the reality of Moscow’s multiculturalism in this period. This is not unusual: western dramas typically render the Russian Empire and its Soviet successor - a vast multi-ethnic territory - as a far more homogenous place than it really was.
The state-run hotels of the 1920s were, in particular, typified by a striking diversity of language and ethnicities. Several of the Central Asian Soviet republics were ostensibly founded at congresses held inside the Metropol itself. In the 1920s alone, the Japanese communist Sun Yat Sen, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, the African-American radical Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and the Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy all passed through Moscow’s state-run hotels either as brief visitors or longer term residents.
In the first episode, at least, there is little sense of this cosmopolitanism.
The arbitrariness of punishment
In the opening scene of A Gentleman in Moscow we witness a man being dragged down a corridor by two-leather jacket wearing Chekists before hearing a gunshot. The implication of the scene - that this is a historical period of persecution - is underlined again in later sequences in the episode, such as the fate of the violinist Prince Nikolai.
The arbitrary nature of Soviet state repression is one thing that I think the show gets broadly right. Sure, it’s unimaginative and reduces the Soviet story to its usual tropes (repression, tyranny, etc). But these tropes do exist for reasons that are worth unpacking.
It may seem outlandish when we learn that Rostov’s life is spared due to a lingering fondness among certain Bolsheviks for a revolutionary poem Rostov once wrote. But this kind of stuff did happen.
A famous example comes from 1921, the year in which this episode is set, when the Bolsheviks granted temporary release to some of their anarchist political opponents to attend the funeral of the celebrated anarchist Peter Kropotkin. An individual’s personal history of revolutionary activity sometimes resulted in more lenient treatment. Chaos reigned where people assumed they would find brutal consistency.
Victor Serge, in his sympathetic memoirs of his participation in the revolution, evocatively portrayed a world where the tide of arrests could sometimes be stemmed by personal interventions. Nonetheless, he remembered these years as a time of nightmarish arrests overseen by a revolutionary leadership possessed by ‘psychoses of fear and power.’ It was an ‘immense and demorsalizing blunder’, he recalled, and a bloody one.
Revolutionary voices like those of Serge - introspective and critical - are not prominent in the fictional Metropol.
I confess:
I often envy those who create historical fiction. They can break free of the footnotes and imagine themselves into the past in a way that historians cannot.
Historical fiction, Hilary Mantel noted, ‘comes out of greed for experience’. Consuming historical fiction is therefore a way for us to satisfy our greed, to imaginatively inhabit a past moment or movement that does not survive in the historical record. In this sense, I personally find my greed for experience unsatisfied by A Gentleman in Moscow. The rules of how this fictional world functions do not accord with how I broadly understand the reality.
But that does not mean it is bad TV. In fact, I enjoyed it (and previously, I liked the book too).
I’ll probably keep watching, even though I belong to the admittedly tiny category of people who cannot really switch off my historian-brain when watching it.
When I’m really greedy for a dramatic representation of my corner of the Soviet past, I’ll just rewatch Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton staring longingly at one another across a crowded room of soldiers in the 1981 film Reds.