This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachel with Alan Phillips. His book is The Red Hotel,

the Metropolitan Hotel and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. Back to the hotel.

Alan, you're conducting your interviews and you're assembling in this enormous amount of material

in the period of time when suddenly the Soviet Union is gone, but the Russian Empire turns

non-transparent and sinister again. Events you never meant to bring together, but you address

that matter in your introduction and

your afterwards. What do we learn from the Red Hotel? We didn't mention that Polganoff,

the man who ran the journalist so that they couldn't send anything true. Everything in Russia is true

except the facts. Wasn't that Charlerton? Yes, that was Charlie. Jonathan said that, yes, yes, yes.

Paul Ginoff becomes head of Tass.

We wondered why Tass was so repetitive in the 1950s and 60s.

It's because the man who learned to do that at the Red Hotel.

So today, what are your reflections as a journalist about how Moscow is treating journalism one more time? Well, I think

if you look at what drives Putin, it's very clear that one of his heroes, and he has many

heroes in the past is Stalin. Not Lenin, of course. Stalin is the bogey man, but Stalin.

Stalin, of course, won the great victory at huge cost.

I'm sure your listeners will know that there was a huge cost.

But when you read that 24 million Russians, sorry, Soviet citizens died in that war for the victory.

And many of these were unnecessary and due to the incompetence of Stalin and his conduct of the war in the early years

when he allowed whole armies to be to surrender to the Germans.

Anyway, to get back to the main issue.

So Stalin established a playbook, which was, if you want to make

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