3/8: 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
🗓️ 26 December 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
3/8: The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War by Alan Philps (Author)
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 the |
| 0:05.2 | This is CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor continuing with Alan Phillips. The book is The Red Hotel |
| 0:12.2 | The story of the Metropolitan Hotel still centered in Moscow and the |
| 0:17.7 | untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. We're focusing on the heroines of |
| 0:22.4 | the Metropolitan Hotel we now turn to one of the |
| 0:25.2 | heroines and tragedies of the Metropolitan Hotel. Her name is Natalia, but we begin |
| 0:31.4 | introducing the senior correspondent, the grand old man of covering Moscow, 17 years, 15 years, depending on where you are in the war. His name is Cholerton. He lives in an apartment that looks |
| 0:46.3 | like a dorm room from a graduate party that ended badly. It's a shambles and it's not heated but Charlatan continues to |
| 0:55.9 | turn out copies because he's very famous as a correspondent from the Soviet |
| 1:00.8 | experiment. This means from Stalin to the purges and into the war. |
| 1:07.0 | Alan, what do we need to know about Charlton's reputation at the time and let reputation ever since before we meet Natalia? |
| 1:17.0 | Well, Cholleton was unique in that he was the only correspondent who had stayed or been allowed to stay since |
| 1:26.3 | the since the 1920s so he'd been seeing the rise of Stalin seen seen the show trials, the purges, and then the beginning of the war. |
| 1:38.0 | He was an eccentric intellectual. He could have had a career as a Cambridge historian, but he decided that all he wanted to study was Russia and the only way he could work was a journalist. So he had a unique |
| 1:57.2 | encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened in the past 15 years. |
| 2:03.0 | Most of it of course he couldn't get past the censor. |
| 2:06.4 | But he was very generous with briefing |
| 2:08.9 | the blow-ins, the correspondence who passed |
| 2:11.6 | who passed through Moscow. he would tell them everything |
| 2:14.3 | everything he knew in fact it was pretty difficult to stop him talking because he |
| 2:19.3 | knew so much he would come up in a sort of tsunami of recollections, jokes and reminiscences. |
| 2:30.0 | The Russians tolerated him because in some way he seemed to be part of the landscape. |
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