2/4: The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War by Alan Philps (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2023
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Hotel-Metropol-Stalins-Propaganda/dp/1639364277/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By 1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. To turn these reporters into Kremlin mouthpieces, Stalin imposed the most draconian controls – unbending censorship, no visits to the battle front, and a ban on contact with ordinary citizens.
The Red Hotel explores this gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds. On the surface, this regime served Stalin well: his plans to control Eastern Europe as a Sovietised ‘outer empire’ were never reported and the most outrageous Soviet lies went unchallenged.
But beneath the surface the Metropol was roiling with intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were secret dissidents who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Using British archives and Soviet sources, the unique role of the women of the Metropol, both as consummate propagandists and secret dissenters, is told for the first time.
At the end of the war when Lenin returned to Red Square, the reporters went home, but the memory of Stalin’s ruthless control of the wartime narrative lived on in the Kremlin. From the weaponization of disinformation to the falsification of history, from the moving of borders to the neutralisation of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
1940 Moscow
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Batch with Alan Filps. The book is the red hotel. |
| 0:11.6 | It's an icon of architecture in Moscow. It's still there. It's being renovated today |
| 0:17.5 | in the 21st century. But in 1941 to 1945, it was the headquarters of the media that was |
| 0:26.4 | allowed into Moscow to tell the story that Moscow wanted to hold. One of those media |
| 0:32.0 | stars, newspaper stars Correspondent's journalist, was a debutant who was as bad as far from Charlotte |
| 0:39.8 | Haldane and a hard-nosed reporter you can get. A debutant named Alice Motz, who was called |
| 0:46.5 | affectionately moatsy by everybody. I learned from Alan Filps the author that she was engaged |
| 0:52.2 | eight times, never married, and enjoyed herself. She had a wonderful war, but at some point |
| 0:59.4 | was Moscow as being besieged by the German army. The British ambassador takes it upon himself, |
| 1:06.8 | a personal mission to make sure that Alice leaves, and nothing bad happens to her otherwise |
| 1:12.2 | FDR and her parents will never forgive the British Empire. Who is Alice Motz, Alan? |
| 1:18.5 | Alice Motz was a wealthy socialite, very well educated. I think she spoke apart from English, |
| 1:25.5 | definitely Spanish, French, German, and I'm sure Italian. Before the war, she conceived |
| 1:34.0 | a strange idea to invite herself to Moscow. She knew the ambassador there, and he said, |
| 1:43.1 | Oh, yes, come along, come along, Alice, I'm sure to be fine. But when she turned up, she thought, |
| 1:51.1 | I see all these generalists are here, I ain't going to become a war correspondent too, |
| 1:56.0 | and people said to her, excuse me, Alice, your literary output is so far constricted to a book |
| 2:05.0 | called No Nice Girl Swairs, which is a sort of a tongue-in-cheek guy to manners from a |
| 2:12.0 | wealthy white socialite. And she said, no, if these people committed war correspondents, I can too. |
| 2:18.0 | And they also poo-poo, that's never going to happen. Anyway, the embassies, the British and the |
| 2:23.7 | American embassies wanted all the women or what were known at the time as the embassy wives |
| 2:30.0 | to leave Alice hid wherever she could. She managed to find refuge in a British embassy, |
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