I'm John Boucher with Alan Phillips. His wonderful, rich anecdotal, overwhelming book about

wartime Moscow, the Red Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel, and the untold story of Stalin's

propaganda war, is a series of heroines who live several lives.

And we're now following Nadia, the granddaughter of a prosperous, successful rabbi,

who's now a Soviet agent, but at the same time a translator inside the Metropolitan Hotel

for several journalists.

She's sort of the grandmother, oh, big sistered mother to all the

other secretaries. But Blondon is a very famous correspondent, relentless, successful. He actually

is taken to the front and views, Alan tells me, von Paulus after the surrendered Stalingrad.

But after the end of the war, Blondon fences himself as a novelist.

And he writes a book that reveals way too much about how Nadia kept him well informed

during the war.

What happens, Alan?

Well, Blondon was an Australian. He was an ambitious Australian journalist. At the time, people like Blondon thought Australia was too

small and provincial a place to really show off. So he was determined to make his future in Europe and America.

And that drove him to Moscow. He was not particularly keen on Soviet communism. He didn't think it was the future of the world,

but he knew there were lots of secrets there.

Nadia worked for a number of British and American journalists.

And as the war dragged on,

and it became clear that Stalin or the Allies were going to win. She effectively became a secret

dissident. She'd lost her faith in Stalinism when she and Alex came back from New York. Her friends,

she saw her friends being carted off in the purges, being tortured or just

...