HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 4/8: 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
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
4/8: 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 | I'm John Batson with Alan Phillips, the author of the new book, The Red Hotel, |
| 0:09.5 | the Metropolitan Hotel and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war, |
| 0:13.3 | which resembles a piece of 20th century history, |
| 0:16.3 | except for it resembles a deal of what's going on in Russia |
| 0:19.7 | and throughout the world that practices censorship |
| 0:22.7 | because they want one version of the story told. |
| 0:26.1 | The other capitals we could speak up, but right now we're speaking of Moscow. |
| 0:29.9 | And Ralph Parker, the correspondent for the Times, for the London Times, for the New York Times, |
| 0:36.9 | a man of mystery mystery and his secretary, |
| 0:41.1 | Valentina, who is impossible not to love because of one scene that Alan presents us. |
| 0:48.4 | It's a moment when there are revelations expected about the Khatine Forest. |
| 0:53.9 | That's the massacre of the Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviets in 1940. |
| 1:02.2 | And what we have here is the correspondence in the Metropolitan Hotel, 41, 4243, were given the Soviet version. |
| 1:09.4 | The Nazis did it. |
| 1:13.0 | Well, they were even taken out there. |
| 1:26.2 | And Harrison Salisbury, in his first correspondent assignment, went on this special train out to the Ketin Forest to view what the Soviets believed was definitive proof. There was no definitive proof. |
| 1:28.2 | It was going to be a press conference in the Metropolitan Hotel. It's late at night. The AP correspondent, I think his name was King, is keen on |
| 1:35.5 | keeping Valentina from accompanying her correspondent, Ralph Parker, into the ballroom. Alan, |
| 1:43.5 | that's as much of the story as I can remember vividly. |
| 1:46.5 | What does, what happens then? |
| 1:47.9 | Why does, why does Parker swing at King? not the not not not the not the not the not the not the not the ap thank you um yeah this was a this was a |
| 2:02.6 | a a press conference by the deputy deputy deputy foreign minister who was who was none other than |
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