HOW STALIN'S NKVD MANAGED THE INFORMATION WAR, 1941-45: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
7/8: 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 on the world. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:07.7 | Alan Phillips, |
| 0:08.5 | the new book is The Red Hotel, |
| 0:10.6 | The Metropolitan Hotel, |
| 0:12.2 | and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. |
| 0:15.7 | Tanya is our heroine. |
| 0:18.1 | Tanya is 28 years old, |
| 0:20.2 | and she's lived and survived starving with her mother and her |
| 0:25.5 | daughter. And she sees a moment where the English that she picked up in her earlier education, |
| 0:31.9 | she's tried to do a lot of things and been thwarted because she's the daughter or the granddaughter |
| 0:37.1 | of not of the former people. |
| 0:39.0 | That is, she's suspect as being a counter-revolutionary. |
| 0:43.8 | She's not a member of the Communist Party. |
| 0:46.0 | She watches the Red, the Metropolitan Hotel is my memory. |
| 0:51.0 | And I turn to you, Allen, to say she sees two British naval officers, I believe, |
| 0:56.1 | an admiral and a captain. And she's so captivated by them, she wants to meet them. How does |
| 1:01.5 | she manage that? Well, she meets them. She's, her husband, her Russian husband was a documentary filmmaker. |
| 1:16.6 | And they had separated, but when they separated, he gave her something more valuable in wartime than money. |
| 1:25.6 | And that was a book of tickets which allowed her to have lunch at the house of artists, |
| 1:35.7 | a sort of cultural center. |
| 1:37.9 | And she was having lunch, I mean, not because she was greedy, because otherwise she'd just |
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