eBook - ePub
The Red Hotel
Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War
- 352 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Red Hotel
Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War
About this book
The untold history of Moscow's Metropol hotel—a fervent spot of intrigue, secrets, and the center of Stalin's nefarious propaganda during WWII.
*A Washington Post Best Book of the Year*
In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By1945, 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 battlefront, 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 neutralization of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
*A Washington Post Best Book of the Year*
In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By1945, 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 battlefront, 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 neutralization of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.
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Yes, you can access The Red Hotel by Alan Philips,Alan Philps in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Russian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Prologue: Odessa, April 1919
- Chapter 1: June 1941: The Accidental War Correspondent
- Chapter 2: July–September 1941: Suitable War Work
- Chapter 3: August 1941: Mother of the British Revolution
- Chapter 4: Meet the Metropol
- Chapter 5: 1917: The Making of a Young Revolutionary
- Chapter 6: September 1941: Buttering Up the Press
- Chapter 7: October 1941: The Trouble with Journalists
- Chapter 8: October 1941: The Great Moscow Panic
- Chapter 9: November 1941: The World Is Much Poorer
- Chapter 10: Winter 1941–42: Feast in Time of Famine
- Chapter 11: 1921–23: Carry on Spying
- Chapter 12: 1942: Girls of the Metropol
- Chapter 13: Summer 1942: Kremlin Stooges and Fascist Beasts
- Chapter 14: 1931–32: Amerika
- Chapter 15: Summer 1942: Mr and Mrs Russia at Home
- Chapter 16: October 1942: Prisoner of the Metropol
- Chapter 17: 1942: An Army in Exile
- Chapter 18: 1943–44: A Polish Mass Grave
- Chapter 19: Summer 1943: The Visa Weapon
- Chapter 20: Who Was The Real Ralph Parker?
- Chapter 21: November 1943: The Party at Play
- Chapter 22: February 1944: A Taste of Abroad
- Chapter 23: 1944–45: ‘The Ghosts on the Roof’
- Chapter 24: The Metropol’s Invisible Wall
- Chapter 25: May 1945: Winston Smith in Moscow
- Chapter 26: 1947–48: The Knock on the Door
- Chapter 27: 1951: The Hen and the Eagle
- Chapter 28: 1977: From the Arctic to the Côte d’Azur
- Chapter 29: Post-War
- Afterword
- Photographs
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Bibliography
- Index
- Picture Credits
- Copyright