Welcome to the world where an hour spent will make the two
parallel worlds of the Soviet times understood and tangible!
In
the 1970’s, my parents had been to Tallinn and I had a leaflet of a hotel Viru
in Tallinn, amongst the tourist literature my mother always collected. So, when
I visited Tallinn, I had to see this place where they had stayed. Little did I
know the hotel housed a museum with a fascinating story !!
Intourist
is the Russian state travel agency created in 1929. It became the manager of
the best hotels of the post Czar era in the USSR and arranged trips to 145
cities. I had business dealings with it in the 1980’s when I was in the travel
trade and we got many Russian inbound groups through them. It had a monopoly on
all incoming tourists to Russia. Privatized in
1992 and from 2011, was majority owned by a British company until in November
2019, a Turkish company Anex Tours acquired the stake from the British Govt
Receiver.
Viru Hotel was amongst the top five hotels in the Soviet Union competing with the best hotels in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Yalta. This was quite a challenge as the hotel management had to have great diplomatic skills and tact to ensure that important decision makers, comrades, inspectors, coming from Intourist, executive committees of the Estonian SSR, City of Tallinn suppliers, the hotel trade union and party organisations like Komsomol and of course the KGB, were all kept happy. No small task when you are under supervision 24/7. 
Publicly,
which mainly existed on paper, happy Soviet people lived in abundance and
friendship under the wise leadership of the single party with no accidents or
catastrophes in it, let alone sex. The real world was considerably more
versatile and complicated in nature.
During
the Soviet era, it was rumoured that the KGB had a folder on every person and
that the intelligence service operated in the Viru Hotel. What was the
Viru Hotel ?
In one of the main streets in Tallinn, in Viru Valjak or
street, is the Hotel Viru. It has a unique KGB Museum on the 23rd floor, whose
access is only by an official guided one hour tour for the visitors who are
intrigued by the city's secret history and how the KGB functioned in the times
of the Cold War in the 1950’s through 1980’s. It tells us a story about the
operatives and what they were up to in their filing on everyone who had come in
this hotel. In those times of KGB, the Hotel Viru was designated exclusively
for foreign guests visiting the USSR. It is James Bond’s Russia brought alive
!! 
First opened on 5 May 1972, the hotel building
was the first high-rise building in Estonia and an inseparable part of the
Tallinn cityscape. Nowadays the hotel is connected to the shopping centre Viru Keskus.
But why was the hotel built in
the first place?
Between
1944 – 1960’s, Estonia was visited by very few Finns (nearest neighbours other
than Russia) and no foreigners. In 1964, the Finnish President Kekkonen visited
the country, signed a friendship pact and ferry traffic began in earnest
between Helsinki and Tallinn. By end 1967 over 15,000 Finns visited Tallinn. This
now required a new infrastructure including a hotel. In a meeting between
Central committee of the Estonian Communist Party, Council of Ministers of the
Estonian SSR, and Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1964, the decision was taken
to build the hotel on Viru Square. This square has had different names thru the
ages – Russian Market, Stalin Square, Viru Square, Adolf Hitler Strasse etc.
various Stalinist designs were never implemented due to funding issues. 
The Soviet Union gave the construction project of Viru hotel
to a construction company Repo Oy from Savonlinna Finland in 1969 and construction of the hotel started in
July 1969 with 400 Finnish labour on site. The building height was reached in
14 months. In 1970, the hotel was officially named hotel Viru. However, the
construction company went bankrupt in the middle of the construction project in
1971, after a fire broke out on the top floors of the hotel in December 1970.
Because of prestige reasons, the Finnish state had to find another construction
company, and provide a state backing for the project. The new construction
company Haka Oy finished
the hotel in May 1972 before the due date Spring 1972. 
Believe
it or not, as such events like fires did not happen in the Soviet Union, the
fire was never recorded. The hotel
project aroused interest as other institutions like the Pribaltiiskaja in
Leningrad with roughly the same space cost five times as much and the Intourist
hotels in Latvia and Lithuania took six and eight years to complete. Over 7,000
people visited the site to study the construction techniques of the Finns.
The
project paid off for the Finnish Government because it resulted in a new construction
project in Pääjärvi in the same
year, and later new construction projects in Enso and Kostamus , both of which were in Karelia.
During the Soviet era, the 23rd floor of the hotel housed a KGB radio centre, used to eavesdrop and spy on the hotel guests. 60 of the hotel rooms had concealed espionage devices, and even some of the tables in the restaurant had microphones. The KGB left the hotel in a hurry right before the independence of Estonia in August 1991, but the secret rooms were not found until 1994. As you will see there was a clear large notice that there was nothing beyond the sign! The former radio centre is now a museum.
There were many myths of the activities of the KGB in Hotel Viru. The KGB had the whole hotel under its watchful eye. From its opening until 1991 when the operation disappeared overnight ! The hotel was monitored because of the foreigners and especially expatriate Estonians who visited it.
The KGB had 10 staffers in the hotel. Other indirect workers were trained also to keep an eye .... room service, waiters etc. the KGB operatives were faceless and it was best not to notice them. The KGB had two offices – in Room 307 and 315. They wiretapped telephones, collected and studied personnel files, inquired if parents had fought in the Great Patriotic war (1939-45), relatives living abroad, and also reports of all tour guides escorting foreigners.
Hotel communication engineers were asked sometimes to replace a working phone with a similar unit but adapted to KGB needs for tapping. Later, as technology came in, the whole building’s phone network was wiretapped.
Don’t forget that under Russian control, commodities were never
easily available. Orange juice was imported from Russia. Potatoes, flour, meat
and other items were rationed by Trade Board of the Executive Committee of
Council of People’s Deputies of the City of Tallinn. Funding was assigned by
Moscow according to allocation applications. No economic logic was followed.
The beauty of Viru in Tallinn was that it became an island –
a foreign state – where foreign alcohol, cigarettes, was available along with
access to foreigners. There was mainly group travel those days and most of them
had their passports taken away by the hotel.
The hotel
The hotel
room rates were decided by Moscow and apparently remained a
secret until the end of the 1980’s. Interestingly, the stereo sound technology
was built by the hotel engineers themselves. The audio control bar looked like
a space ship but it is also what gave the name to the Stereobar on the ground
floor.
Those days’ hotel colour schemes were never warm and friendly. But the tourists at least had the benefit of the Currency Bar in the 2nd or 22nd floor restaurants, cocktail bar etc. Locals could only visit these thru an acquaintance but they could go to the Stereobar or the 1st floor cafe.
Our
group was led by a stern faced, primly dressed in black, guide who spoke good
English. She took us through every are of the museum – she showed us the official
documentation / id’s of staff, publicity brochures, examples of crockery used
at the time and the leaflets which were in the corridor publicising Viru Hotel’s
various facilities.
For all of the tourists, we were fascinated by the high level of local engineering genius used in fabricating various items for espionage.... the pinhole cameras, the small ladies purse with recording device, the phones with wire taps, and other equipment to record and spy on visitors.
.
A notable increase in KGB activities took place in 1975 when Helsinki hosted the Conference on Security and Disarmament. The hotline of the soviet leaders between Moscow and Helsinki was handled through the 23rd floor communication hub at the Hotel. The second major event was the Yachting Regatta of the Moscow Olympics in 19680. Because of its shape, the sculpture of the mermaid installed in front of the hotel got the nickname “Sharp Ears”.
The
doormen of the hotel had the primary task of helping the KGB. It seems they did
not like to help guests and their job was to keep unwanted persons away from
the hotel! Floor managers, standard practice in those days, also kept an eye on
the movement of people and kept a logbook, as did the reception. Officially it
was in the name of preserving order.
I
distinctly recall that when I visited Russia in 1983 in Moscow, St Petersburg
and Kiev, I was unnerved by the sight of those elderly matrons who sat by the
lifts / stairs keeping an eye 24/7 on all entering their floor. This was the
practice in every hotel on each floor. In every museum, there was a security
person in each room keeping her beady eye on you.
Trip
Advisor rates the museum at # 44 out of 297 things to do in Tallinn but in my
view for anyone wanting to really learn about the history of the Russians in
the city at the time of the occupation, its Russian links are here, right in
the KGB Museum; which should thus rank way up the scale.
One
cannot imagine the scrutiny under which everyday lives of locals and foreigners
were lived. No one was above suspicion. Those of us who have lived in a free
world should always be aware of what happens on the other side. We came down
from our tour to the disco bar on the ground floor – from where we had
originally begun. The guide exhorted us to come back in the evening to try out
the bar and its music but I was leaving the next day for Finland, so I had no
time. The trip was a real experience for me in seeing Communism and how they serial investigated every individual, trusting no one, and it
flourished ...... and how this same system of policing still exists in a variation in certain
countries even today.
Text and photographs copyright of the author. Data on the hotel’s origins and KGB are from the exhibition at the hotel. Material was collected by Mr S. Nupponen, an established Finnish economic journalist and writer acknowledged by the Hotel Museum.
The writer of this blog gratefully acknowledges the importance of their work.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Text and photographs are copyright of the author. No part of any article or photographs maybe transmitted or reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without written permission. Do contact the author on email -- helpthesun@gmail.com