HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 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
🗓️ 4 November 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
3/8: 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
1945 POLISH ARMY
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel. Continuing with Alan Phillips, the book is The Red Hotel. |
| 0:12.6 | The story of the Metropolitan Hotel still centered in Moscow and the untold story of Stalin's |
| 0:19.1 | propaganda war. We're focusing on the heroines of the Metropole Hotel. |
| 0:23.9 | We now turn to one of the heroines and tragedians of the Metropal Hotel. |
| 0:29.8 | Her name is Natalia, but we begin introducing the senior correspondent, the grand old man of covering Moscow, 17 years, 16 years, 15 years, |
| 0:40.6 | depending on where you are in the war. His name is Chalerton. He lives in an apartment that |
| 0:45.6 | looks like a dorm room from a graduate party that ended badly. It's a shambles and it's not |
| 0:53.7 | heated, but Chalon continues to turn out copies |
| 0:56.8 | because he's very famous as a correspondent from the Soviet experiment. This means from Stalin |
| 1:04.0 | to the purges and into the war. Alan, what do we need to know about Charlottleton's reputation at the time and reputation ever since before we meet Natalia? |
| 1:17.8 | Well, Cholerton was unique in that he was the only correspondent who had stayed or been allowed to stay since the 1920s. |
| 1:28.3 | So he'd been seeing the rise of Stalin, |
| 1:31.3 | seen the show trials, the purges, |
| 1:36.3 | and then the beginning of the war. |
| 1:38.3 | He was an eccentric intellectual. |
| 1:42.3 | He could have had a career as a Cambridge historian, but he decided that |
| 1:48.5 | all he wanted to study was Russia, and the only way he could work was a journalist. So he had a |
| 1:56.5 | unique encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened in the past 15 years. Most of it, |
| 2:03.4 | of course, he couldn't get past the censor. But he was very generous with briefing the blow-ins, |
| 2:09.9 | the correspondence who passed through Moscow. He would tell them everything he knew. In fact, |
| 2:16.1 | it was pretty difficult to stop him talking |
| 2:18.6 | because he knew so much he would come up in a sort of tsunami of recollections, jokes and |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.