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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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Located at Tverskaya Street 36, it had four stories and housed the Filippov Caf. [1] The hotel was taken
over by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and renamed , i.e. Hotel de luxe. It came to be
used by the Communist International (Comintern) as lodging for communist revolutionaries from other
countries.[4] Guests were lodged according to hierarchy, more important individuals received better rooms.
[5]
In June and July 1921, 600 delegates who came to the Third World Congress of the Communist
International from 52 countries were housed at Hotel Lux. With the sudden influx of so many international
revolutionaries, the hotel began to be known as the "headquarters of the world revolution". [1] Germany
alone sent 41 delegates. The Hamburg Uprising was discussed at the hotel,[3]both before and after the
events. After the Comintern was founded, many of the Party's leading functionaries lived at the hotel,
including Ernst Reuter[7] and the hotel became the best known of the Comintern's buildings, although its
offices were elsewhere.[5]
Children played in the halls[1][3] and attended a German-language school, the Karl Liebknecht School, set
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.
In 1941, the hotel was evacuated. The first residents returned in February 1942. [1] At the end of World
War II, the Ulbricht Group left Hotel Lux for the airport to return to Germany on April 30, 1945 to become
the new leaders of the German Democratic Republic.[9] The purpose of the trip and whether or not the
assignment was temporary or a permanent return to Germany was not known to the whole group until they
arrived in Berlin.[21][22] The youngest of the group was 24-year old Wolfgang Leonhard.[21][23][note 3]
The last political residents left the hotel in 1954, either willingly or by eviction, and the hotel returned to
normal, operating under the name "Hotel Zentralnaya". [1]
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]
Klement Gottwald[1]
Antonio Gramsci[28]
Antonio Graziadei[28]
Julius Hay[1]
Jules Humbert-Droz[29]
Aino Kuusinen
Wolfgang Leonhard[23][30]
Ho Chi Minh[1]
Imre Nagy[1]
Wilhelm Pieck[5]
Theodor Plivier[1]
Karl Retzlaw[7]
Ernst Reuter[7]
Rudolf Slnsk[1]
Richard Sorge[1]
Ernst Thlmann
Palmiro Togliatti[1]
Erich Weinert[1]
Markus Wolf
Clara Zetkin
Hedda Zinner[1]