MOSCOW IN WARTIME, THEN AND NOW: 6/8: 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
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
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.
But beneath the surface the Metropol was roiling with intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were secret dissidents who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Using British archives and Soviet sources, the unique role of the women of the Metropol, both as consummate propagandists and secret dissenters, is told for the first time.
At the end of the war when Lenin returned to Red Square, the reporters went home, but the memory of Stalin’s ruthless control of the wartime narrative lived on in the Kremlin. From the weaponization of disinformation to the falsification of history, from the moving of borders to the neutralisation of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bouchard with Alan Phillips, his wonderful, rich anecdotal overwhelming book about |
| 0:11.1 | 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 |
| 0:25.0 | successful rabbi who's now a Soviet agent but at the same time a translator |
| 0:31.0 | inside the Metropolitan Hotel for one for several journalists. |
| 0:35.6 | She's sort of the grandmother now big sister mother to all the other secretaries. |
| 0:41.4 | But Blundin is a very famous correspondent, relentless, successful. |
| 0:47.8 | He actually is taken to the front and views Alan tells me fromis, after the surrendered Stalingrad. |
| 0:54.5 | But after the end of the war, Blunden fancies himself as a novelist, and he writes a book that reveals way too much about how Nadia kept him well informed during the war. |
| 1:08.0 | What happens, Alan? |
| 1:10.0 | Well, London was an Australian. He was an ambitious Australian journalist. At the time, people |
| 1:20.0 | like Blundin thought Australia was too small and provincial a place to really show off. |
| 1:27.0 | So he was determined to make his future in Europe and America and that drove him to to Moscow. He was not particularly |
| 1:40.0 | keen on Soviet communism. He didn't think it was the future of the world, but he knew there were |
| 1:46.8 | lots of secrets there. Nagee 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 |
| 2:09.6 | in Stalinism when she and Alex came back from New York |
| 2:14.0 | her friends she saw her friends being carted off in the purges |
| 2:18.0 | being tortured or just shot in shot in the back of the head |
| 2:22.0 | and she decided that that Stalinism and indeed Leninism |
| 2:27.6 | was a big mistake. Obviously she couldn't tell anyone. |
| 2:31.0 | When the war started with her good English, indeed American English, she was first, she was chosen to put the English speaking, to keep an eye on the English |
| 2:43.0 | correspondence and make sure they told the right story. |
| 2:47.4 | But secretly, she was airing her real views. |
... |
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