HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 1/8: 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
🗓️ 4 November 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
1/8: The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War by Alan Philps (Author)
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor. |
| 0:09.9 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.4 | I welcome Alan Phillips. |
| 0:15.3 | His new book, The Red Hotel, Moscow, 1941, the Metropole Hotel, and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. |
| 0:25.0 | We begin, however, with the correspondence who spent their time at the Metropal Hotel, |
| 0:31.4 | trying to tell a story that was forbidden, generally speaking, by the Soviet regime. |
| 0:38.2 | The Soviet regime wanted its story told every day, no matter how many times it was repeated. |
| 0:43.6 | And the correspondence from the Times of London, from the New York Times, all were struggling |
| 0:49.1 | with the censor, struggling with the wartime conditions in Moscow, struggling with the assignments that they had |
| 0:56.4 | from back home via the telegraph, and were remarkably successful, not only because they |
| 1:02.6 | represented amazing enterprise institutions in London, in New York, around the world, but also because of the Russian women |
| 1:13.4 | who served as their secretaries and survived in most instances because of their relationship |
| 1:20.4 | to the better food at the metropole. Moscow is starving. Soviet Union has been starving for years, |
| 1:27.2 | one of the stories that the Soviets |
| 1:29.2 | don't want told. I welcome Alan and congratulate him, and we begin with one of his heroines. |
| 1:36.2 | Her name is Charlotte Haldane, and of significance, Charlotte, when she arrives in the Soviet Union |
| 1:43.3 | in 1941, is a communist and has been a communist |
| 1:47.5 | promoter for many years. |
| 1:50.2 | Alan, wonderful to welcome you, and thank you very much. |
| 1:54.2 | Charlotte Haldeen, married to the very famous scientist, JBS Halvane. |
| 1:58.7 | She was a communist. |
| 2:00.7 | What did that mean in the 1930s when she was promoting the Soviet paradise? |
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