VASILY ULRICH
In the Metropol the journalists used their rooms as sleeping quarters, offices and drinking dens. But other residents, senior Bolsheviks who had grace-and-favour lodgings, lived in the hotel in a kind of parallel world. One of these was a corpulent but otherwise unremarkable man by the name of Vassily Ulrich. Known in the Kremlin as Stalin’s Executioner No. 1, he passed unrecognised among the foreign journalists.