Hello, comrades! My name is Sergei. I was born in the USSR in 1971. Since 1999 I have lived in the USA. Ushanka Show channel was created to share stories as well as my own memories of everyday life in the USSR. My book about arriving to America in 1995 is available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ASergei+Sputnikoff&s=relevancerank&text=Sergei+Sputnikoff&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1 You can support this project here: www.patreon.com/sputnikoff with monthly donations Support for this channel via PAYPAL: paypal.me/ushankashow Ushanka Show merchandise: teespring.com/stores/ushanka-show-shop If you are curious to try some of the Soviet-era candy and other foodstuffs, please use the link below. www.russiantable.com/imported-russian-chocolate-mishka-kosolapy__146-14.html?tracking=5a6933a9095f9 My FB: facebook.com/sergey.sputnikoff Twitter: twitter.com/ushankashow Instagram: instagram.com/ushanka_show/ Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_Ushanka_Show/

I live in Romania. My parents filed a request for a landline in 1986. in 2009 someone from the phone company came to install it. They of course denied the service as we already had mobile phones.

In Poland people thought the lack of phones was a conspiracy by the government to stop people communicating and colluding against the government. Nope. It was just sheer incompetence and ineptitude by the imposed Soviet communist system that caused dire shortages.

At least you never worried about telemarketers or robocallers

My father has been an amateur radio operator since the 1970s and said that when he made radio calls to the Soviet Union the operators there could only talk from licensed clubs that were monitored and had a resident KGB officer on site, they couldn't keep their radio equipment with them at their house the way my father or other Americans did.

My friend worked in a telephone exchange before they were automated. When connecting calls to russia, he said all of the telephonists in the Soviet Union were older women who very rude and blunt. If you could not communicate with them clearly, they just slammed the phone down and you had to try again hoping you got someone else who was more patient and understood english better to connect a call.

My father was in the US army. My family was stationed in Italy in the early 70's. They requested a landline be installed in their off base home, and when they were packing to leave three years later, they recieved a notice that the phone company would be around soon to install the phone.

In the novel "Sharashka" Solzhenitzyn discussed the engineering problems with the Soviet phone system in the 1950s. Stalin tried to call Beria, could not reach him, then asked an advisor to make him a clear telephone. Thus the "vocoder" was conceived. The work was farmed out to skilled specialists in the Gulag system. They would keep quiet, worked cheap and long hours. After dragging and stalling for a spell Stalin bitched to Abakumov and Ryumin about it. They hauled in the civilian overseers, screamed at them, stomped on their toes and slapped them. Ryumin was a sadistic petty man who enjoyed beating people on the Sciatic nerve with a stiff rubber club. One victim described it as "an explosion went off in my skull". He delivered the punishment in his office, keeping a rug rolled for that purpose. "Now the cries will raise to the heavens" he said before beating the victim. Abakumov was arrested after Beria. He threatened the Interrogator. He also refused to any food than eggs, fearing being poisoned. Stalin created quite a mess. I don't know if he ever got his vocorder. We will probably never know if the USSR would have survived in the long term. I'd like to think that so many million Soviet people worked like dogs, day and night, to make it work for them. One cannot blame them for things not staying together.

It's amazing to think that it took 5 years to get a telephone int USSR and sometimes longer in Eastern Europe. Here in Australia, we also had a telephone monopoly till the mid 1990's. Though here in Australia, people would moan about having to wait 6 weeks to get their phone connected!

Over here in Australia we had "party line" phone systems in the 50s and I think you would get a weak ring if it wasn't for you and a strong one if it was. But the other 5 or so families sharing the line could listen in and even talk.

Upto 5 years? In Greece, we waited for 10 WHOLE YEARS! My father made the application when i was born (13/4/1980) and the line was installed in 12/5/1990.

In Argentina in the 1970s (I was a child back then there) it took my family about a decade to receive a phone (from the very inefficient state monopoly)

5 years was a good time to wait for the phone company to install a line in your house here in Argentina. My family got its first phone in 1991 or 1992 and we apllied for it early in the early eighties, so 5 years was a very good time and our country wasnt and isnt comunist.

In the USA, two addresses with the same phone number was common before 1960 or so, and was called a "party line." It was a bit cheaper. My parents had a party line when they moved into their first house in the mid 1950s. But after 6-12 months, my mother discovered that the other "party" was a next-door neighbour! So my mother told my father to ring the phone company and get rid of the party line, which he did. I recall hearing stories of party lines in rural areas and poor neighbourhoods until the early 1970s.

I am really loving your videos. So fascinating! I took Russian language in high school in America between 1988 and 1991. As an American who was a kid during the late 1970s and early 1980s, we heard all kinds of things about the Soviet Union. In 1991 our high school hosted about 12 teenagers from the Soviet Union who come to visit Ithaca in Upstate NY. We talked a lot about Glasnost and Perestroika in Social Studies and in my Russian class in high school. Ronald Reagan was kicking ass and Gorbechov was opening up to the west. Anyhow, these teenage Russian students all came over to my parents house for dinner. We had a huge house and my mother made a lot of food, including corn/chicken chowder. I remember feeling so sorry for these Russian students because their clothes were so out of style, too small, and worn out. The ones that had glasses wore hideous frames. Some of the students had problems with their teeth, scars, more asymmetry in their faces, etc. They just didn't look all that healthy and I just wanted to have them stay in my house in America so they could heal and not go back to Soviet Union. These Russian students were amazed at what they saw in America -- the grocery store, the mall, Montgomery Wards, Sears, JC Penny, Jamesway (like Target, Walmart) etc.

My uncle waited about 12 years on a list to get a home phone in East Germany.

Telephones in the US in the 1970's operated similar to what you described. I remember my grandmother having a community telephone line where sometimes I would pick up the phone and I would hear someone else talking. Then you would have to wait for them to get off the line to make your call. The only difference was that almost everyone had a phone in their home.

in Brazil in the 70's/80's people used to rent phone lines. It was declared as a high value good in income tax declaration. Also, companies used to sell stocks of the own company and giving the buyer a bonus of having the line, but people ended selling the line and forgetting the stocks :S.

Really enjoy your videos. I'm an American and a couple years older than you and it's very intriguing hearing the perspective of a youngster growing up in the USSR. We had a shared line (party line I believe was the official name; not like the 1-999 PARTY GAL) once when we lived out in the sticks in western NY. I was about 10 and we'd listen in on these old ladies yapping away hahaha

Great video! I grew up in the 80s and I always seen news about the Soviet Union, how threatening the Soviet Union was t the free world. My teacher told me once that an American could never visit the Soviet Union so that made me so ever curious why and made it a place I have always wanted to visit. I was always curious of how life was for Soviet people. You are now answering all of my questions, I will sign up to your Patreon to support this great content. I hope you are able to keep your health since sometimes going back through memory lane can trigger certain feelings. To your health! Thank You!

I find these vids so interesting. I'm 40, I was raised and live in the Midwest of the United States. The idea of having to get on a government waiting list to get a phone line or a car is such a strange concept to me. Seeing how communism actually functioned in people's everyday lives is fascinating.

$2.50 a minute for long distance calls? And to think I used to think that my first cell phone plan back in 2000 was expensive ... $0.40/minute. Except Evenings and Weekends which were free.

Comrade Ushanka , having spent my time in college receiving a Russian / CCCP history degree , I really enjoy your show ,for a few years now , keep up the great work , you make a difference , and very educational , thank you !

We had to build our own line ca 1.5 km. Got one line shared with neighbors - no simultaneous calls ( same Блокиратор телефонный thingie) . We got number witch belonged previously to a big cow farm. So, we got many early morning calls, when other side yelled to us "why isn't milk sent out yet?".

In Canada, one of my teacher's parents got a party line way back in the day, anyone on it could overhear other people's conversations. Over the years their various neighbors got their own lines until they were the last ones remaining. As of roughly 2010, they were still paying a dirt cheap grandfathered-in phone plan for this party line of one.

I forgot about the party lines, that probably explains why people used to be so formal on the phone (don't want your neighbor to hear your gossip :). I grew up the 80's and remember that pay phones were 25 cents and you only got about 10 minutes...you would have to keep feeding the phone with quarters to have a long conversation.

It would be interesting to see a video clip of what Ham radio in the days of the USSR was like. There weren’t a lot of Soviet hams in the air back then but I did manage to talk to a few on the 28 megahertz ham band from Russia in the Far East. I received a “QSL” card or record of our contact from Vlad in Sakhalin Island 8 months after our contact. I still have his card today.

I grew up in SE WI and my parents had a phone line which was shared with the next door neighbor in the 1960s until they finally determined that they could afford to pay extra a month for a private line. Being on friendly terms with your (phone) neighbor was MUST! Good old AT&T monopoly.

Not much different in pre 1995 India. Upto 10 years on waiting lists, and the phones did not work all the time. Only difference was we did not have paired lines. And direct dial was introduced nationwide in the late 80's... eliminating the need for booking a trunk call.

I recall reading in the early 1990s that the Moscow authorities had called for bids to replace and upgrade that city's dial telephone system. The Swedish firm Ericsson (which is still a major player in telecommunications around the world) had installed Moscow's first dial telephone system in 1906. Now here's the shocker. That system was still in force when the USSR ended December 1991. During the Soviet era, when equipment broke down, replacement parts were made to order. Additions to exchange equipment so as to permit more lines and more numbers, were likewise made to order. In both cases, existing hardware was simply copied. But the technology did not deviate from what Ericsson had installed in 1906. From 1905 to 1990, the population of Moscow increased from ~1.5M to ~9M people.

People do not realize how much hardware an old landline required. Even in the US there were huge buildings dedicated to the mechanical switching devices. People do not realize how expensive phone calls were. Modern cell phones were a great great leap forward. When I was young 1050's in the US we had a party lines, They were a common first home phone for many. When I was younger my aunt in another state would initiate the call's because out of state calls were expensive and she got s good discount. You also got an off hour discount,

I remember asking at the Greek state run telecoms company, OTE for my own phone line in the 1990's and I was told a landline would take 2-6 years. Even then the company just ran a line to the apartment block, I had to pay a technician to link it from the junction box to the 5th floor where I was living. As phone lines were so sought after there was a 'black market' in phone numbers, you could buy them and jump the queue, but this could cost 2-3 months wages. BTW the shared phone lines were popular in UK even in the 1980s, then they were known as 'party lines'.

Soviet telecommunications systems were the best in the world. Virtually every dissident household had perfect reception!!!

My grandmother had a shared phone line. I don't know if it was a phreaking culture in USSR, but it existed in the US and to some extent in Norway. Does anyone know? The famous 2600 Hz is a frequency in hertz (cycles per second) that was used by AT&T and Bell systems as a steady signal to mark currently unused long-distance telephone lines. During the 1960s, in-band signaling was used, so the same line for both voice conversations and telephone connection management signals. Since a pause in a voice conversation would produce silence, another method was required for switches to determine available circuits. The solution AT&T created was to produce a 2600 Hz tone on idling trunks. A device, known as a "blue box", was created to generate the 2600 Hz signal on a line being used. This indicated to switch that the line was idle. After the tone, the switch believed another call was starting, and used the subsequent dialed digits to connect the call. The AT&T or Bell mistakenly published the technical documentation on how the phone system operated, so anyone in a college could look that information up and manipulate the phone system, set up long distance calls, call the phone on the Red Square etc.. The whole system was controlled by tones of different frequencies.

In America, up to the early '90s we still had residential "party lines" with up to 4 customers on a line in the cities and and up to 8 parties in some rural areas. But as a rule most 4 party lines only had two or three subscribers. In cities and towns privet lines were almost always available, but of course that cost more. Usually, if you moved into a different house or apartment, your phone was hooked up within a week of you placing the order. Before the Bell system was broken up around 1982, the average basic residential phone service in America was $8.00 a month. Within a few years of the breakup that had risen to over $25.00 a month.

We waited 15 years in Poland.

My mom told me as a young child living in the little town of Manila, Iowa in the mid ‘40s they had a crank phone and her family’s phone “number” was one long crank followed by two short. The whole town was also on one phone line so you could pick up and listen to anyone in town. Crazy haha!

I loved this video. Some of the things you describe are similar to the situation in Egypt in the 1980s when i lived there. For example, you had to go to a central location to make a non-local call (or you could book the call for a specific time at home). You were also put on a long waiting list to get a land line.

I lived in a very rural area growing up, actually I still do live in same house on same 80 acres of land my grandfather purchased. Anyhow in the late 60s and 70s we only had 1 phone line for the 7 families that lived in a 4 mile area. Our ring was 2 short 1 long 1 short. Since all the families had teenagers using the phone at times was very hard, usually if you said it was a very important call, or even an emergency they would usually get right off the line for you. We finally got a private line around 1988 or 1989. Thanks Southwestern Bell.

I remember in the 80's it cost so much money to call to the next county over from us. Long distance charges applied from Miami to Ft.Lauderdale. Only 30 min. Drive.

I remember here in Argentina during the 70's we had a government managed telephone company , as an example an apartment for sale was published "with telephone line" and the price was usualy 10.000 dollars up just for it .....waiting for a line was up to 7 to 10 years..

I never have had a live phone line in any home I’ve lived in. I’m in my mid 40s in the US so it was very odd growing up. Anyway, I’ve never bothered to get one hooked up and also didn’t get a cell phone until I was in my late 20s. I still leave my phone on the kitchen counter on my days off. My friends are used to the idea of just calling my wife if it’s important so she can let me know who I need to call. Never had TV either. I remember kids in school talking about to shows and I’d have no idea what they were talking about. Oddly enough, I work for a telecommunication company, have for more than 20 years…

Your paired phone sounds a little like the party line I grew up with in rural Georgia, USA. There would be four or five phones on the same line and while one person was talking nobody else could use the phone. The weird thing was that you could pick up the phone and listen to your neighbor's conversation! I think that changed over to private lines in the late 80s or early 90s.

When Bell Telephone had its monopoly, long distance (station to station) calls were expensive. If anyone answered the phone, it was charged. Person to person calls were even more expensive but if the person you were trying to call wasn’t present, there would be no charge. People came up with crazy coded messages to avoid paying the charge. “Would you accept a collect call from John Sheridan?” Meant that John was spending the night at the Sheridan. A collect call from John Driver, meant that John was still driving at the time. The most popular method was to make a person to person call to a non existent family member and leave him a message.

I heard that athletes & sports people who bring medals to their country in USSR would be giving priority in telephone installation.

Very Interesting! I enjoy hearing about other countries and cultures and generations. Your videos keep me interested the whole way through. Thank you for making these!!!!!!!! 😋👍

these videos are amazing. keep it up!!

These are great videos! Thank you!

In the US, your paired line was called a party line. Our family had one in 1955

It was a very complex question. All depended on a place of living and who was a person, what was his or her status. If there were free cable pairs, getting a line was comparatively simple. If not, this was a problem - to put an additional cable was expensive. A phone company was a government company and monopolist. It has no interest to extend a cable net. Big officials and other communist bosses had not such problem - they got phone line everywhere. In apartment buildings there were more chances to get a phone. For it was needed less of a cable, there were more connected subscribers. In areas with private houses it was almost unreal. It was necessary to lay a lot of cable, there were fewer connected subscribers. My grandfather lived in the private sector and was disabled, a war veteran. A neighbor was also a veteran. They went together to the city administration and asked to lay a telephone line, because they were old sick people and they may need to call an ambulance. The nearest street phone was 800m away, but it was constantly broken. The other was about 2 km away. As a result, the main cable was laid to the our street by the end of the 80s, and we already laid the distribution cables ourselves in about 1995, after USSR already. We collected money together with our neighbors, hired equipment for digging a trench along the street, bought a cable. Trenches to the houses we dug ourselves by hand. The neighbor did not live up to this point, my grandfather had the phone the last 6 years of his life.

Amazing!, Thanks comrade for this video.

Paired Phones? Sounds like the old Party Line system. We had those in the US until the 1960s or later. People shared a single phone line. The other parties did not get a dead line. Everyone could hear each other. Special courtesy was needed. You lifted the phone. The other party would ask if you had an emergency. If not an agreement was made to release the phone line "sooner or later".

We had a " party line" back in the early 60's, and the phone's used two letter previx, such as AL6-6797. If you pick up the phone to use it, the other party might be on it, you had to wait. But, your talking much later in the old Soviet Union. Very cool thanks for sharing.

BRAVO!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANKS FOR THE VIDEO ❤ LOVE FROM SWEDEN ❤

Very interesting. I love your channel. 😊

While in Egypt, before the revolution, when it was all old "maintained" Soviet stock infrastructure, somehow the topic of phone service comes up on the first day. They were in actual disbelief when I was telling them AT&T connects the phone in under a day.

I love this guy! My people were from Ireland and I am fascinated by other countries and cultures. Because so much of Soviet Russia was never shared with the rest of the world, its all new information.

My grandpaw grew up dirt poor in Alabama in the great depression. They built a hydro-electric dam near his house in the 20s, so they got electricity in the late 20s. By the end of WW2, his family shared a party line phone with their neighbors. So like 3 or 4 families split a phone.

The Soviet Union wasn't the only place this happened. One of my Irish cousins told me that it took 5 years to get a phone in their home in a southwest suburb of Dublin. This would have been in the late 70s. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened in many parts of the USA.

Interesting! And just the right length.

I bet the phones were "party lines" in more ways than one.

The way your uncle got his landline was very capitalistic. Respect.

We had a phone in our home here stateside but it was a party line. Shared with 3 other families. In 1976 we finally got one line. My dad didn't want to pay the extra money. But we got to be teenagers and we argued in it with the teenagers next door all the time to get off the phone. Plus my mom said she knew Mrs shimzt was listening to all her conversations. So it was single line after that . Very interesting video about Russia phone system.

I was in the U.S. Navy and in 1988 I called home to Arizona from a call center in Mombassa Kenya. Call cost $12 a minute.

Great video! Any chance on doing a future video on public transit in the USSR? Maybe discussing travel within the city versus long-distance or between city travel? Was it easy to get most places, and were the schedules pretty convenient for buses and trains? Did you have to make lots of transfers to get from place to place, and did it take a long time to travel? Did buses and trains run throughout the night? Thanks again and look forward to your next video!

Thank you

I remember that in East-Germany, one of the most advanced Countries in the Socialist World, 20 % had a phone by 1989. After 5 years of Capitalism - 99 %.

Have just discovered your channel and am loving these videos. So interesting and entertaining. I am learning to speak Russian and as part of that I am recommended by my tutor to watch old Eralash films which are funny but also have simple language. I would be interested in a video about childrens television shows in the former USSR. Thank you for this content though. Its very good.

My parents got their apartament in '87 and wrote papers for a telephone. They had to wait for nine years. After that in '96 I was running from school to the "kiosk" on the long break to buy a token and call my mom 🙂In Poland pay phones were not for regular money but for tokens. Why? Inflation. In the 90's we weren't using coins anymore. One dollar was 50.000 zlotys and average worker was making 4.000.000 zlotys per month...

This is priceless, at 16:00 it shows a Russian mobile phone, with rotary dial!

It seems like sending notes via pigeons would have been more efficient than telephone. While the system in the U.S. wasn't perfect, it was more commonly utilized. I remember my parents regularly calling relatives in other states on a whim and I phoned my school friends on a daily basis. Even the poorest of families in town had a telephone. The worst problem that we had with the telephone was that our number was one digit off from one of the local funeral homes. We'd get misdialed calls all hours of the day. We were taught to always carry enough change for two emergency calls from a public telephone, but calls to emergency services were free, and a collect call home could always be made. It was just Midwestern preparedness and responsibility. Even in small towns here in Ohio, public phones were everywhere in town and at every gas station until cell phones became common.

funny how almost everything you described was a part of my life growing up in 90s Romania

$2 a minute oh boy that's definitely too expensive

Funny you mention your uncle fearing lines of people to use his phone; my mom lived here in America in a city. In 1950 they bought the first tv in the neighborhood. There was a line of people that nearly went around the block waiting to watch the TV in the house.

In ussr estonia it was about 2-5 yrs, BUT there was exeptions- if u had connections with someone who had connections in the higher ups in telephone system they would move u high in the list of installments. Allso u got real lucky if a commy political higher up moved to ur street of houses, so every "private" house on that street was hooked up in order to hide the fact that there was a political figure living on that street, bc if phonelines run only to one house, everyone would know that house, and want to use it has a " public phone" Thats how my dad got his phone installed , was told wait 5 yrs, they came back 5 weeka later and installed the phone. When a single phone was installed in a small village, everyone ealse in that village and all the villages very close to it would then be informed where the "phoned" house is and thus that allso means that nobody ealse in the villages would get their own phones for the next 10-15 yrs, that happend to my country home, phone was installed to my neigbour house and everybody started to use that has a " public phone booth" and nobody ever get their own phone installed. I guess the idea was to cover the country by simply install only 1 phone per village. Really funny exeption happend in 1980, when military built a goverment nuke shelter bunker, they had to install phones in to every apartment in the near by town in order to keep the bunker phone switching board clicking .

In Austria there were also the half and quarter telephones (line shared with 2 or 4 numbers). Halbapparat and Viertelsapparat. I experienced this in a Vienna apartment 1988.

Back in 1993, a popular joke in Poland about the Polish telephone system was that the telephone was still under communist control because the price which was set by the state, was artificially low. The number of phone lines was limited and if there was a problem, there was a long wait to get it repaired.

I remember the phone bill from my first apartment in 1983. It averaged $100 a month In 1983 dollars. So $300 now. It was similar in that local calls were toll free. That was about $30. The rest of the bill was all long distance toll charges. For context I made $200 a week salary. So the phone cost me half a weeks wages.

I’m your channel fan from Thailand.

As you said at 4:34 we had that system in the UK in the 60s and 70s but it was known as having a party line.

Same with phones in the UK in 60s and 70s. It was called 'party line'.

Party line hell my friends parent had that 1982.

I just noticed the song when you talk about patron in your videos is the theme song from that “время” news program on Soviet TV

In the extremely rural south east where I grew up AT&T had not updated the phone lines in rual Appalachia, my grandpa had to share a phone line with a naghbor until the early 80s too. We in America called them a party line however, they had the same number so you could listen in on your naghbor's call and, if you picked up a call for your naghbor you would have to make the caller call back so your naghbor knew it was for them.

In Canada, the telephones themselves used to be owned by the telephone companies. In the 1950s or 1960s, my dad and his friends would use a party line (I think) to talk to each other, until the telephone company called and told them that they would call the police if they did it again.

But if you're the only one with a telephone, who are you gonna call.?

we had same system in usa...called a party line....would have diff rings for diff houses..all 1 line..we had till like 1980

Funny how many say they preferred how it was in those times. Now it is easy as we have cell phones. Even getting a phone line set up is easy these days.

Well.. USSR was very big and... it turns out that quite diverse. My grandparents and my parents had phones, without some huge effort and without any political connections or whatever.. and most of my friends had phones in home as well as I clearly remember that as kid during 80s I was call them and asked politely whoever was picked up to give phone to my friend to ask him out or smth like that :) Here in Estonian SSR it was quite common that house blocks was built in way that they already had wall socket for phone for upcoming residents. I used one of these up to modern days :) I believe it was 2014 when they cut out adsl internet connection over soviet time copper phoneline and installed fiber to my apartment. Probably such small country like Estonia it was much easier to stuff with various "luxury" like phones and stuff.

A friend of mine worked in China in the mid 80's, and said they had one phone per apartment block.

I notice that the Soviet Union doesn't sound so terrible when you consider that things were bad everywhere, even in Britain, in those days compared to now, at least in terms of infrastructure and services. I'm not saying everything is great now, but it's also not like there was a time or country without any problems. We have different problems now.

Back in Van Wert, Ohio, where I grew up, there were party lines that are very similar to what Sergei discussed in this video. Of course this was 45+ years ago (I’m 54 years old now).

I am in love with some of the debushkas in the pictures now lol.

how did the ussr deal with blind people. Here in Canada we have the CNIB, Like the ussr you are always on a list with the CNIB to get any assistance. Thank you for your videos they are very informative.

in philippines also wait many years for landline before 1990 and always got crossed line i.e. wrong number now cellfone is very cheap and easy

Thanks to Nehruvian socialism, it was the same story in India until the mobile revolution rescued the population.

My parents in the UK (60s/70s) shared a partyline phone connection with neighbour Mr Binnie. And I think if he picked his phone up 1st, & then me, I could hear what he was saying, & possibly what was being said to him. I could possibly even have joined in ...

According to that sign on the public phone you could also dial 04 for directory services. You didn't mention that so perhaps directory services wasn't available in many places.

Your mother is an amazing person.

I'm curious about your medical, I live in Canada and are fortunate that the majority of our care is free, although it is not what it was, while our neighbours the USA are still struggling with health care.