MOSCOW IN WARTIME, THEN AND NOW: 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
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 12 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 | This is a CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor. Alan Phillips. The new book is The Red Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. |
| 0:15.6 | Tanya is our heroine. |
| 0:18.0 | Tanya is 28 years old and she's lived and survived starving with her mother and her daughter. |
| 0:26.0 | And she sees a moment where the English that she picked up in her earlier education, |
| 0:32.0 | she's tried to do a lot of things and been thwarted because she's the |
| 0:35.7 | daughter or the granddaughter of not of the former people. That is, she's suspect as being a counter-revolutionary. She's not a member of the Communist Party. She |
| 0:46.1 | watches the Metropolitan Hotel as my memory and I turn to you, Alan, to say she sees two British naval officers, I believe, |
| 0:56.0 | in Admiral and a captain, and she's so captivated by them, she wants to meet them. |
| 1:01.3 | How does she manage that? |
| 1:06.0 | Well, she meets them. |
| 1:25.8 | She's, her husband, her Russian husband was a documentary filmmaker and they had separated but when they separated he gave her something more valuable in wartime than money. And that was a book of tickets which allowed him, allowed her to have lunch at the house of |
| 1:34.0 | house of artists a sort of cultural center and she was having |
| 1:39.3 | having lunch I mean not because she was greedy because otherwise she'd just be living on black bread. |
| 1:44.7 | So she actually had some vegetables and things like that and an occasional piece of meat. |
| 1:51.1 | And the director of the place said |
| 1:53.2 | Cobrad I think you speak English and she said yes said would you like to |
| 1:58.6 | would you like to compare would you like to be the master of ceremonies at a concert which we are giving |
| 2:04.8 | for the allies for the British and Americans? And she said, yes, yes, and her first thought |
| 2:10.9 | was what would she wear because she didn't have anything to |
| 2:13.2 | work anyway this this took the concert took place the Russians couldn't find much |
| 2:20.5 | in the way of American or British classical music, but a few show tunes there and she announced them. |
| 2:30.0 | And afterwards she found herself talking to the American ambassador who was an |
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