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Hotel Lux () was a hotel in Moscow that, during the early years of the Soviet Union, housed many leading exiled Communists. During the Naziera, exiles from all over Europe went there, particularly from Germany. A number of them became leading figures in German politics in the postwar era. Initial reports of the hotel were very good, although its problem with rats was mentioned as early as 1921. Communists from more than 50 countries came for congresses and for training or to work. By the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had come to regard the international character of the hotel with suspicion and its occupants as potential spies. His purges created an atmosphere of fear among the occupants, who were faced with mistrust, denunciations, and nightly arrests. The purges at the hotel peaked between 1936 and 1938. Germans who fled Hitler for safety in the Soviet Union found themselves interrogated, arrested, tortured, and sent to forced labor camps. Most of the 178 leading German communists who were killed in Stalin's purges were residents of Hotel Lux.
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including Ernst Reuter[7] and the hotel became the best known of the Comintern's buildings, although its offices were elsewhere.[5]
ordered to do so. "What's your room number?", asked the security officer. "Number 13." "We're only taking away the even numbers tonight!" Astonished, Lang went back to bed. Nor did the NKVD ever knock on his door again.[15] In the morning, the doors of those arrested were sealed;[16][note 1] the wives and children had to move to other quarters and were ostracized as "enemies of the state".[9][note 2] The children of parents under investigation were placed in orphanages, where some died from illness and others rejected both their parents and their own German identity.[18] Some of the adults arrested were sent to a gulag or were executed. Those who came back were regarded with suspicion, as was the case with Herbert Wehner, who was taken away and returned twice. Such people were assumed to have betrayed others[1] under torture[11] or to save themselves. In Wehner's case, that was what happened.[9] By 1938, in order to get upstairs in the hotel, a propusk was needed, a document that said one was authorized to get past the armed guard, standing in front of the elegant Art Nouveauelevator.[19] Even highlevel members of the Comintern could not get past the guard without a propusk.[19] The atmosphere affected the children. Rolf Schlike, who was a child at Hotel Lux, later wrote, "I grew up in Moscow, in the center of power, and state and non-state criminality, Gorky Street, Hotel Lux. It was the years 19381946. Around us too, there was juvenile violence. We played 'partisan and German fascists' in our Hotel Lux, and one kid in our group was hangedfor fun. He couldn't be revived again. There were frequent battles with iron bands with the kids from the neighboring building." [1] Of the 1400 leading German communists, a total of 178 were killed in Stalin's purges, nearly all of them residents of Hotel Lux.[6] By comparison, the Nazis killed 222 of those 1400 leading German communists. Within the top leadership itself, there were 59 Politburo members between 1918 and 1945, six of whom were killed by Nazis and seven by the Stalinist purges.[6] The saying among the German communists was, "What the Gestapo left of the Communist Party of Germany, the NKWD picked up."[3] When Leon Trotsky was killed in August 1940, the purges at Hotel Lux stopped, bringing a brief respite to the exiles.
After the collapse of communism, the hotel housed offices, small travel agencies, liquidation companies and other small businesses on the lower floors, the upper floors remained hotel rooms.[3] The building, still called Hotel Zentralnaya, was bought by the holding company Unikor in 2007. Unikor and its majority shareholder, Boris Ivanishvili bought the hotel to renovate it and re-open it as a luxury hotel.[1] There were mostly offices in the building at the time of its sale. The Mandarin Oriental Moscow, a luxury hotel, is being built on the site,[25] behind a restored version of the historic facade, the original building having since been largely demolished. The street name has been restored to Tverskaya; the building remains number 10.
Legacy[edit source]
Numerous guests and residents of Hotel Lux have written about the hotel, initially in reports and articles, later in books and memoirs. Early reports from before the purges were often positive, though mentions of rats appear from the beginning. Accommodations were described in favorable terms [7] and the atmosphere as full of camaraderie.[9] In East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the Socialist Unity Party commissioned memoirs (Erinnerungsberichte) from former exiles who had lived there.[18] These were carefully written official reports that sanitized and supported the official version of events. Franziska Reubens, who lived there with her husband and children, wrote in guarded language, "It is not easy to write about the memories from that time, to write about them honestly."[18] Other people turned away from the Communist Party, some as a result of their exile in the Soviet Union, and wrote more bluntly and critically about the hotel, such as Ruth von Mayenburg, who in one passage, used cannibalism as a metaphor to describe the period.[26] In 1978, von Mayenburg published the first history ever written about Hotel Lux.[27]
Bolesaw Bierut[1] Willi Bredel[1] Georgi Dimitrov[4] Hugo Eberlein[8] Zhou Enlai[1] Ernst Fischer Ruth Fischer, was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany and held under house arrest for 10 months[1]
Antonio Graziadei[28] Julius Hay[1] Jules Humbert-Droz[29] Aino Kuusinen Otto Ville Kuusinen Wolfgang Leonhard[23][30] Lotte Khn, 1935 Ruth von Mayenburg, Communist Party of Austria[26] Ho Chi Minh[1] Imre Nagy[1] Margarete Buber-Neumann, returned to Germany in 1940 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact[16] Heinz Neumann, executed in 1937 in the Great Purge[16][31] Wilhelm Pieck[5] Theodor Plivier[1] Karl Retzlaw[7] Ernst Reuter[7] Rudolf Slnsk[1] Richard Sorge[1] Ernst Thlmann Josip Broz Tito[1] Palmiro Togliatti[1] Walter Ulbricht,[1] 1935 Gustav von Wangenheim[1] Herbert Wehner, 1937 to early 1941[9] Erich Weinert[1] Markus Wolf Clara Zetkin Hedda Zinner[1]