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2. Translators Defy Soviet Espionage And Terror - Alan Philps episode artwork

Sep 6, 2026 37 min

2. Translators Defy Soviet Espionage And Terror - Alan Philps

from The John Batchelor Show Hosted by The John Batchelor Show

CAPTION: NOVEMBER 1941 MOSCOW Translators Defy Soviet Espionage And Terror Alan Philps, Part Two: Philps continues with the lives of the Metropol Hotel's translators and Stalin's propaganda war. He introduces Nadia, the granddaughter of a rabbi, who served as a Soviet military intelligence spy in Shanghai and New York, hiding microfilm inside pocket mirrors. Working as a translator, she became a secret dissident, only to be arrested and exiled to the Gulag for eight years after Australian journalist Godfrey Blunden revealed her true views in a thinly veiled novel. Philps also shares the story of Tanya, a glamorous Russian translator who married Britishcorrespondent Ronnie Matthews. Ronnie successfully forced the Soviet regime to permit her exit. The conversation concludes with Philps reflecting on how Stalin's brutal playbook of total media censorship and expendable human life directly mirrors Vladimir Putin's modern disinformation campaigns. (2)

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