S8 Ep550: 8. Philps draws parallels between Stalin’s media control and Putin’s modern propaganda machine. He argues that Stalin’s "playbook" of disinformation and suppression remains central to Russian leadership today. The file also notes the post-war silence of W

0:00Some crimes are never forgotten. Others are lost to history. Those are the ones we focus on in crimes of the centuries. A history meets true crime podcasts revisiting murders, trials, and frauds that once dominated headlines. I'm Amber Hunt, your host and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. If you like true crime that feels both cinematic and historical, find crimes of the centuries wherever you get your podcasts. This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Bashar with Alan Filps. His book is The Red Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel and the Untold Story of Stalin's propaganda war. Back to the hotel. Alan, you're conducting your interviews and you're assembling in this enormous amount of material. In the period of time, when suddenly the Soviet Union is gone, but the Russian Empire turns

1:00non-transparent and sinister again. Events you never meant to bring together, but you address that matter in your introduction and your afterwards. What do we learn from the Red Hotel? We didn't mention that Poganov, the man who ran the journalist so that they couldn't send anything true. Nothing in Russia is true except the facts. Wasn't that Cholerton? Yes, that was true. John C. said that. Yes, yes, yes. Poganov becomes head of task. We wondered why task was so repetitive in the 1950s and 60s, is because the man who learned to do that at the Red Hotel, so today, what are your reflections as a journalist about how Moscow is treating journalism one more time? Well, I think if you look at what drives Putin, it's very clear that one of his heroes, and he has many heroes in the past, is Stalin. Not Lenin, of course, Stalin is the bogeyman, but Stalin.

2:00Stalin, of course, won the great victory at huge cost. I'm sure your listeners will know that there was a huge cost, but when you read that 24 million Russians, sorry, Soviet citizens died in that war for the victory. And many of these were unnecessary and due to the incompetence of Stalin and his conduct of the war in the early years, when he allowed whole armies to be to surrender to the Germans. Anyway, to get back to the main issue. So Stalin established a playbook, which was, if you want to make the country great again to borrow an American expression, you have to have complete control of the media.

3:00And during his 20 years in power, he had even before the Ukraine war, he'd established control of the broadcast and printed media, all under state control or under the control of Kremlin-friendly corporations or oligarchs. And the other lesson of Stalin is that human life is expendable and, in fact, death is a good thing if it's for the motherland, which is why we have seen horrendous numbers of Russians killed in this unnecessary war far more than Afghanistan, for example, which was such a disaster that it helped cause the fall of the Soviet Union.

4:01Anyway, so those are two lessons that Stalin has taken. Of course, you can't take historical parallels to the present and the future. There are huge differences that the media, the digital media, are all comparison different from the media of the 1940s. With one decree in 1941, Stalin demanded that all the radios in the Soviet Union should be handed in so that no one could listen to German broadcasts. And so frightened was everybody that they did indeed. And these radios didn't because they'd have gone to the gulag if they were finally listening to a foreign broadcast. You can't do that in the digital age. So the disinformation is slightly different. In the 1940s, Stalin tried and actually succeeded to a large extent in getting foreigners

5:08to believe what he believed, what he wanted them to believe. It's more complicated now. I think the main goal of the disinformation abroad is to confuse people. People think, if you spread enough doubt abroad, then people will think, I don't understand who is right and who is wrong in this Ukraine thing. Let's just forget about it. And so his goal is that the Americans who have the arms and the money to support the Ukrainians in their defense of their land will lose interest slowly and eventually and perhaps even with the next presidential election, you would have a president who is not interested in supporting Ukraine, which will effectively freeze the conflict and allow Russia maybe to resume it in five or ten years when they only feel stronger.

6:12Final concern I have is the newspapers who published the censored stories. Are they regretful that they participated in that propaganda? Throughout the war, the British Embassy in Moscow realized that the reporters were being misled, manipulated, but Stalin was going to beat Hitler in Europe. So it was an unpleasant aspect of life that had to be tolerated. At the end of the war, the Embassy was clearly hoping that the journalists would come back and say, we were robbed, we were told what the right. No one said a word. There was only one journalist called Paul Winterton. He went to his paper, the news chronicle and said, we're the piece to saying the conditions of censorship, which was not just to protect military secrecy, but to control the whole

7:16narrative of everything. This paper refused to run it. You went round Fleet Street, which was the home of all the newspapers. They all refused to run his place. No one, they all wanted to keep this quiet. It's the book is The Red Hotel, The Metropolitan Hotel and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War. I'm John Batchler. You're listening to CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler. Some crimes are never forgotten. Others are lost to history. Those are the ones we focus on in crimes of the centuries. A history meets true crime podcasts revisiting murders, trials and frauds that once dominated headlines. I'm Amber Hunt, your host and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. If you like true crime that feels both cinematic and historical, find crimes of the centuries

8:17wherever you get your podcasts.