THE BEST FOOD, VODKA, ROMANCES AND BETRAYALS: 168: 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
🗓️ 26 February 2024
⏱️ 8 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 | listening to a podcast a |
| 0:02.0 | taking a break from the outside world and spending some time alone |
| 0:06.0 | well there's none of that in a celebrity big brother house |
| 0:09.0 | no take a break from the outside world because there is no outside world and no spending time alone |
| 0:15.6 | because the cameras are always rolling. |
| 0:18.1 | Celebrities living together for three weeks under one roof. |
| 0:22.0 | There's one place they can't hide. Celebrity Big Brother, live, 4th of March on |
| 0:27.8 | IT1 and ITVX. I'm John Bouchard with Alan Phillips, his wonderful, rich anecdotal overwhelming book about |
| 0:41.2 | 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 Nadea the granddaughter of a prosperous |
| 0:55.2 | successful rabbi who's now a Soviet agent but at the same time a translator |
| 1:01.2 | inside the Metropolitan Hotel for one for several journalists. |
| 1:05.7 | She's sort of the grandmother, now big sister-mother to all the other secretaries. |
| 1:11.6 | But Blundin is a very famous correspondent, relentless, successful. |
| 1:17.0 | He actually is taken to the front and views Alan tells me from Paulus after the surrender of Stalingrad. is and he writes a book that reveals way too much about how Nadia kept him well informed during the war. |
| 1:38.5 | What happens, Alan? |
| 1:41.5 | Well, Blundin was an Australian. He was an ambitious Australian journalist. At the time, people like |
| 1:50.4 | London thought Australia was too small and provincial a place to really show off. |
| 1:57.2 | So he was determined to make his future in Europe and America and that drove him to Moscow. |
| 2:07.0 | He was not particularly keen on Soviet communism. He didn't think it was the future of the world, but he knew |
| 2:16.6 | there were lots of secrets there. |
| 2:20.5 | 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 in |
| 2:39.9 | Stalinism when she and Alex came back from New York. Her friends, she saw her |
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