Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war. The war correspondents were both bullied and pampered in the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators. Some of these translators were brave secret dissenters who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag.