Hotel Lux

Hotel Lux (Люксъ) was a hotel in Moscow during the Soviet Union, housing many leading exiled and visiting Communists. During the Nazi era, 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 good, although its problem with rats was mentioned as early as 1921. Communists from more than 50 countries came for congresses, 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 had fled Nazi Germany, seeking safety in the Soviet Union, were interrogated, arrested, tortured, and sent to forced labour camps. Most of the 178 leading German communists who were killed in Stalin's purges were residents of Hotel Lux.

Originally named Hotel Frantsiya, the hotel was built as a luxury hotel in 1911 by the son of Ivan Filippov, a well-known Moscow baker, whose baked goods were delivered widely, even to the tsar's residence. Located at Tverskaya Street 36, it had four stories and housed the Filippov Café. The hotel was taken over by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and renamed Люксъ, i.e. Hotel de luxe. It came to be used by the Communist International (Comintern) as lodging for communist revolutionaries from other countries. Guests were lodged according to hierarchy, more important individuals received better rooms. Some rooms were also used for meetings.

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". Germany alone sent 41 delegates. The Hamburg Uprising was discussed at the hotel, 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 and the hotel became the best known of the Comintern's buildings, although its offices were elsewhere.

During the Twenties, the bar of the hotel was often occupied by Yan Karlovich Berzin and his recruiting staff.

In 1933, two stories were added, giving the hotel 300 rooms. The address, meanwhile, was changed to Gorky Street 10. 1933 was also the year Adolf Hitler gained power with the Machtergreifung and soon began to arrest and imprison his political opponents, arresting communists and socialists by the thousands. German communists began to flee to the Soviet Union and the Hotel Lux began to fill with German exiles.

In addition to party functionaries, there were advisors, translators and writers who came with their families. Employees were brought to the Comintern Central Committee's offices by bus. The hotel became overcrowded and conditions were difficult. The hotel was continually plagued by rats; the earliest reports of them were in 1921. There was hot water only twice a week, forcing people to shower in groups, as many as four people at a time. Communal kitchens for the use of residents cooked food next to boiling pots of diapers being sterilized. In spite of the conditions, initially, there was camaraderie among the residents. Children played in the halls and attended a German-language school, the Karl Liebknecht School, set up for the children of exiles. There were a number of English speaking residents in the thirties, living in the Lux. These were not refugees but dedicated Communists from Great Britain, Australia and the United States who went to "help build Socialism." In at least one case an American-born young man who lived with his parents in the Lux volunteered with the Red Army and was killed in combat in the War.

In 1934, after the murder of Sergei Kirov, Joseph Stalin began a campaign of political repression and persecution to cleanse the Party of "enemies of the people". Stalin viewed the foreign occupants of Hotel Lux as potential spies, or as a Moscow newspaper assumed of Germans (and Japanese) in 1937, they were working actively on behalf of their own country. By 1936, his Great Purge began to include the hotel's residents. The hotel then gained a second name, that of "the golden cage of the Comintern" because many would like to have left, but could not while being investigated. Between 1936 and 1938, many residents of the hotel were arrested and interrogated by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Suspicion and betrayal created an atmosphere of fear. Arrests came in the middle of the night, so that some residents slept in their clothes, others paced the floor, or played games of concentration to mask the stress.^{[citation needed]}

An investigation or arrest was prompted more by the atmosphere of terror than by charges of wrongdoing, which were often baseless. Walter Laqueur later wrote of the period, "There was no rhyme or reason as to who was arrested and who was not, the security organs were given a plan to fulfill, a certain number of people were to be arrested in a certain region, and from this stage on it was more or less a matter of accident at whose door the NKVD (the secret police) emissaries would knock in the early hours of the morning." The procedure was for the NKVD to knock, the accused was told to pack a small suitcase with a few things, get dressed and wait outside the door to be picked up and taken away. Then the NKVD returned to collect the accused and seal the door. One night, the NKVD knocked on the Langs' door and Franz Lang was told to get ready. Dutifully waiting outside his door to be picked up, the security police returned. "What are you doing standing around out here?", asked the NKVD. Lang replied that he'd been 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.