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.
