S8 Ep549: 6. Nadia’s secret dissidence is exposed when journalist Blondon publishes a novel revealing her true views. Arrested in 1948, she survives eight grueling years in the Gulag. Philps concludes her story with a "happy ending," as Nadia eventually immigrates

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I'm John Boucher with Alan Filps.

His wonderful rich anecdotal overwhelming book about wartime Moscow,

the Red Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel in the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war,

is a series of heroines who live several lives and we're now following

Nadia, the granddaughter of a prosperous successful rabbi,

who's now a Soviet agent, but at the same time a translator

inside the Metropolitan Hotel for one, for several journalists,

she's sort of the grandmother, now big sistered mother to all the other secretaries.

But Blondon is a very famous correspondent, relentless, successful.

He actually is taken to the front and views Alan tells me.

von Paulus after the surrender Stalin grad.

But after the end of the war, Blondon fences himself as a novelist

and he writes a book that reveals way too much about how Nadia kept him well informed

during the war. What happens, Alan?

Well, Blondon was an Australian.

He was an ambitious Australian journalist.

At the time, people like Blondon thought Australia was too small

and provincial a place to really show off.

So he was determined to make his future in Europe and America.

And that drove him to Moscow.

He was not particularly keen on our Soviet communism.

He didn't think it was the future of the world.

But he knew there were lots of secrets there.

Nadia worked for a number of British and American journalists.

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 Stalinism when she and Alex came back from New York.

Her friends, she saw her friends being carted off in the purges,

being tortured or just shot in the back of the head.

And she decided that Stalinism and indeed Leninism was a big mistake.

Obviously, she couldn't tell anyone.

When the war started with a good English, indeed American English,

she was first chosen to put the English speaking to keep an eye on the English speaking.

Correspondence and make sure they told the right story.

But secretly, she was airing her real views.

None of the other journalists betrayed her views.

But she trusted London because she liked Australians.

She thought the British were snobs.

She didn't like that.

She thought the Americans were so commercially minded or career minded, I would say.

So career minded that whatever she told them would appear in the pages of the New York Times.

But London, she thought, was trustworthy.

Of course, who can trust?

Who can trust a journalist, say I as a former journalist?

Anyway, and she told him what she really thought about it.

And even took him to visit a couple of the home of a couple of old ladies

because at that time, it was impossible for foreign journalists to see the inside of any

piece or the at home. Of course, homes were incredibly crowded.

Living space was at a premium.

So the authorities had said, right, no one is allowed.

No one is allowed to see the inside anyway.

And after they'd left, and London was quite shocked at what he'd heard.

And Nadia said to him, well, of course, you can't write this in your newspaper.

And he said, well, of course, I won't put it in the newspaper.

I'll turn it into a novel.

Well, the novel appeared and the identity and location of the flat of the two old ladies

was not particularly well disguised.

It was obvious where he'd been.

It was obvious who had taken him there.

So there was a knock on the door.

And Nadia was truly arrested.

February 1948.

And from that moment, February 1948, this very

careful woman, is put into Hades.

She spends the next eight years starving to death and watching her daughter

broken Maya, her husband broken Maya.

They are all assigned sent to the gulag.

The fact that Nadia survives is incredible, Alan.

It's the person who helped her most when she first got to one of the transit camps was an

informer. There was no trust whatsoever, except for somehow she determined that the NKVD

or the gulag keepers couldn't intimidate her.

And there was nothing they could do to her that they hadn't already done.

She does emerge after cruise ship secret speech.

Does she move to Israel in the 70s, 80s?

I lost track.

And a happy end of the story.

Her son is in Jerusalem now.

Is that correct, Alan?

It's her grandson. She moved with her daughter.

And her grandson is in Jerusalem still.

He is a professor of ancient history of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

And so the story has a happy ending, although the tragedy of the gulag

and what happened after the war, after the red hotel, after the metropal,

is part of the largest story of the brutality that the Russian people have endured for more

than a hundred years. It's told in the new book, the red hotel, the metropal hotel,

and the untold story of Stalin's propaganda war. The metropal is still there.

When and if it is safe for journalists to be in Moscow again, I intend to be there

to celebrate Alan's book, but right now we're going to tell a happy ending

of the heroines of the red hotel. I'm John Batch.

You're listening to CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler.

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