Hotel Viru and the KGB

I had to go to Estonia for work the other week, and afterwards my wife met in

Tallinn and we stayed there for a few days just to check the place out. One

thing we did was a museum tour at the hotel Viru.

Briefly, this hotel was the first skyscraper in the city, built in the 70s,

mostly to help the city copy with the influx of tourists arriving from Finland

and Sweden with the recent introduction of ferry services across the baltic sea.

Estonia was part of the Soviet Union at the time, so a large hotel that was

basically the only choice in town for visitors from capitalist countries was

obviously approached with a bit of caution. So, they did the obvious thing and

installed a KGB observation post in the top story of the hotel. All of the

hotel's phonelines were routed directly from the hotel to the city's KGB

headquarters and then to the phone company. Many, but not all, of the hotel

rooms were bugged, and these rooms were assigned to politicians, journalists,

priests, etc. The kitchen and bar had special bread plates and ashtrays with

wireless microphones hidden in them. Pretty neat! In '91 the KGB basically

just abandoned the place and fled, and now the hotel makes money charging people

for tours.

One of the rooms on the tour (there are only two, this was actually a fairly

small operation in terms of floorspace and manpower) includes a desk with two

rotary phones on it. Well, one phone is rotary, the other is red and has no

dial or buttons and was a direct line to KGB headquarters. The tour guide

took great pleasure in explaining that when he gives tours to school children

he has to carefully convince them that, yes, these big plastic blocks connected

to the wall by cables are, indeed, phones. Which of course everybody dutifully

laughed at, because, lolz, smarphones are great.

I couldn't help but wonder how many years it might be before he had the much

more challening job of explaining to school children why they are supposed to

find it unusual or interesting or shocking that everybody at the hotel was

having their phone conversations listened to. I mean, that's a perfectly

normal thing that all the "good countries" do today, right? And those ashtrays

with the microphones are just like a primitive Amazon Echo, right? Those KGB

folks were just ahead of the times! Shame they weren't smart enough to do

advertising on the side.