In 1933, two stories were added, giving the hotel 300 rooms. The address, meanwhile, was changed to Gorky Street 10. 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; 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.
Stalin's purges 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, By 1936, his
Great Purge began to include the hotel's residents. so that some residents slept in their clothes, others paced the floor, or played games of concentration to mask the stress. 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. In the morning, the doors of those arrested were sealed; the wives and children had to move to other quarters and were ostracized as "enemies of the state". Even high-level members of the Comintern could not get past the guard without a propusk. 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. In 1941, the hotel was evacuated. The first residents returned in February 1942. Russian authorities had
Wolfgang Leonhard evacuated with the Ulbricht Group, although the latter claimed he did not know the group. 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 Tsentralnaya". == Post-Soviet era ==