Hotel Waiting Room

Le Metropol by Eugen Ruge

Several years ago I read In Times of Fading Light, also by Ruge. I remember only that it was readable but it had no great impact on me. This is not the case here; this book is un-put-down-able.

Presented in novel form, because the facts are interpreted and decorated by the author, this is the ‘true’ story of a minor character in the Stalin Purges as she waits with her husband for more than a year in a hotel room to learn what will become of them. The story is filled with a cast of young European idealists (using their real names) who moved to Russia in the early 20th century in support of communism and who found themselves caught up in Stalin’s hysteria in the 1930’s. It’s about denunciations and ostracisations as people run for cover. It’s about millions of good people being subdued by mere thousands of bad ones.

In an epilogue, the author fleshes out for us how he developed the story from research in his grandmother’s file in the Russian archives, much in the way the opening of the Stasi archives was described in that marvellous film The Lives of Others. We learn how most of them ended up executed or murdered in work camps and the amazing destinies of some who were exiled but unable to return to their home countries because they were communists.