HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 2/8: 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
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
2/8: 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 CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchew with Alan Phillips. The book is The Red Hotel. It's a |
| 0:12.0 | icon of architecture in Moscow. It's still there. It's being renovated today in the 21st century. |
| 0:19.5 | But in 1941 to 1945, it was the headquarters of the media that |
| 0:26.2 | was allowed into Moscow to tell the story that Moscow wanted told. One of those media stars, |
| 0:33.1 | newspaper stars, correspondents, journalists, was a debutante who was about as far from Charlotte Haldane |
| 0:40.4 | and a hard-nosed reporter as you can get, |
| 0:44.3 | a debutante named Alice Motez, |
| 0:46.0 | who was called affectionately MOTC by everybody. |
| 0:48.8 | I learned from Alan Phillips, the author, |
| 0:50.9 | that she was engaged eight times, never married, |
| 0:56.2 | and enjoyed herself. |
| 1:02.9 | She had a wonderful war, but at some point, as Moscow is being besieged by the German army, the British ambassador takes it upon himself a personal mission to make sure that Alice |
| 1:09.2 | leaves, and nothing bad happens to her. |
| 1:11.7 | Otherwise, FDR and her parents will never forgive the British Empire. |
| 1:16.3 | Who is Alice Motes, Alan? |
| 1:18.2 | Alice Motes was a wealthy socialite, very well educated. |
| 1:23.3 | I think she spoke apart from English, definitely Spanish, French, chairman, and I'm sure Italian. |
| 1:31.1 | She, before the war, she conceived a strange idea to invite herself to Moscow. |
| 1:40.3 | She knew the ambassador there, and he said, oh, yes, well, come along, come along, Alice, I'm sure it'll be fine. |
| 1:46.9 | But when she turned up, she thought, hmm, I see all these journalists are here. |
| 1:53.1 | I'm going to become a war correspondent too. |
| 1:56.1 | And people said to her, excuse me, Alice, your literary output is so far, so far constricted to a book called |
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