This is John Bachelor, conversation with Alan Phelps.

His book is The Red Hotel, an improbable story that takes us into wartime Moscow,

Second World War, when Stalin and the Soviets were allied with the United Kingdom, Churchill,

and the United States Roosevelt fighting the Germans, the Hitlerites. What's improbable about it is that

Stalin's terror was going on all around and there was no cessation whatsoever

the abuse of the Russian people under Stalin. and there in this one hotel

in this one hotel in the middle of town,

the Metropol Hotel,

were the media reporters of the United States, Great Britain, all the

resistance of the French government and the Polish government in exile

reporting all the time on what Stalin wanted them to say.

And yet they knew around them was brutality,

as Moscow was under siege by the Hitler rights.

So here's Alan Phillips to remind us what the justice system was like under Stalin.

In 1942 at war with Hitler.

More of this later, thank you.

You know, I think once you'd been arrested,

there was no actual trial. You were just brought before three judges.

The accusation was read out and then a certain sentence was delivered.

Anyone. a sentence was delivered. Anyone being found innocent was extremely rare, you know, maybe two or three percent or something like that. It almost never happened. Once you'd

been arrested, you would be held in pretrial detention and interrogated sometimes every night for 13 nights and kept awake in the daytime in order to force a confession.

But even if the accused never confessed,

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