This is John Batchelor, speaking with the author Alan Phillips, his new book The Red Hotel,

Moscow 1941.

This is the Metropolitan Hotel, the Untold Story where Stalin, the Stalinist, kept all the correspondence covering

the Second War in Russia. All kept in one hotel with translators watched perfectly all the time by the authorities and never

permitted to print anything they knew that wasn't state dictated. The Red Hotel in this particular detail,

Mrs. Alan Phillips telling me, about a man named A.T. Charlton, who was the very knowledgeable, extremely careful

correspondent for the London Telegraph in Russia since the Revolution and the Civil War of the 1920s.

falling in love with a young woman named Natalia, who was Russian and his translator and helpmate the love of his life and Alan tells a very

sad story true story of AT Charlton and Natalia in the Red Hotel. Here's Alan. Much more later in the show.

Alan, what do we need to know about Charlton's reputation at the time and let reputation ever

since before we meet Natalia? Well, Charlotton was unique in that he was the only correspondent who had stayed or been allowed to stay since the

since the 1920s so he'd been seeing the rise of Stalin, seen the show trials, the purges, and then the beginning of the

war.

He was an eccentric intellectual.

He could have had a career as a Cambridge historian,

but he decided that all he wanted to study was Russia, and the only way he could work was a journalist.

So he had a unique encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened in the past 15 years.

Most of it, of course, he couldn't get past the censor.

But he was very generous with briefing the blow-ins, the correspondence who passed through Moscow, he would tell them everything he knew.

In fact, it was pretty difficult to stop him talking because he knew so much it would come up in a sort

of tsunami of recollections, jokes and reminiscences.

The Russians tolerated him because in some way he seemed to be part of the landscape.

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