![]() ![]() ![]() The railway station is always there!” When the official book of the trial was translated into English, the passage about the hotel was deleted. “You ought to have said that they met at the railway station. “What the devil did you need a hotel for?” an embarrassed Stalin berated the NKVD officers who had fabricated the confession. The Hotel Bristol error laid bare the fraudulence of these damning testimonies. The problem for Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, was that not a shred of incriminating correspondence existed, so all the ‘evidence’ had to come in the form of forced and scripted confessions of face-to-face meetings. The point of the trial was to prove the existence of an international Trotskyist conspiracy as a pretext for purging the Communist Party of anybody who might possibly challenge Stalin’s rule. In writing his classical novel, Orwell drew on the very real horrors of the 20th century ![]()
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