HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 5/8: 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
5/8: 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
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor. |
| 0:10.0 | Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:12.4 | With Alan Phillips, the author of The New Book, The Red Hotel, |
| 0:17.1 | The Metropolitan Hotel and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War. |
| 0:21.0 | Continuing with the heroines of the Metropolitan Hotel and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war, continuing with the heroines of the Metropolitan Hotel, |
| 0:24.9 | the young women who offered to translate for the correspondence from English world, |
| 0:30.7 | from the Spanish world, from around the world, |
| 0:33.4 | during the very dark days of the 20th century, |
| 0:37.4 | with the Nazi army, the Vermacques |
| 0:39.8 | army, seeking to destroy the Soviet Union as it sought to destroy Western Europe. |
| 0:46.0 | The Metropolitan Hotel is where the Soviets wanted all the correspondents to say so they could |
| 0:51.2 | be watched, monitors, they could be censored, and the correspondence must |
| 0:56.6 | obey. There were very few opportunities to break out of that mold. It's important now to introduce |
| 1:03.0 | somebody who is at the Metropolitan Hotel as a translator and helpmate for famous correspondents, |
| 1:10.3 | but also had a previous life and a continuing life. |
| 1:14.3 | Her name is Nadia. |
| 1:15.8 | She's the granddaughter of a rabbi and a well-to-do family once upon a time. |
| 1:20.8 | The revolution comes along, however, and her family is now suspect as being the former peoples was one of the ways they talked about |
| 1:29.3 | them. In other words, any intellect, anyone with property, any successful person in any town in all |
| 1:37.2 | of this former Russian empire was to be broken and elbowed aside by brutes, by violence, by gang activity. Nadia witnessed all this |
| 1:48.1 | at the same time became a devoted member of the revolutionary class. And therein lies the story |
| 1:55.4 | that Alan tells of Nadia, who lives, one of them at the Metro Bal Hotel. |
... |
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.