Hacker News Reader

Comment by vumgl | Hacker News Reader

As horrible as the regime was, you would not get arrested for having a walkie-talkie. And anyone could get a phone line, except there was a looong wait (years). And most likely you will end up on a "coupled" line, meaning that you and your neighbor will share the same line - you can listen in to your neighbor's conversation simply by picking up the phone.

View on HN

I know a shepherd that was called to Militia for having one. He escaped because he played dumb. He was called many times after that just to be sure he had no "bad" intentions. All the time the militia men would ponder if he should mess up this guy's life or let him go. The shepherd had no intentions to fight against the regime whatsoever...

The long wait list was because nobody would process the list. All the people that the regime considered needed phones already had them. All the rest were "waiting". Years later I found out that in my city there was plenty of capacity. I'm a telecommunications egineer.

I believe the coupled line didn't need any approval: the number was already allocated. If your neighbor wanted he could allow you to connect but he was on the hook if you did any "bad" stuff (like planning a Revolution). There was also a problem from where to buy the second phone...

As far as I know these were the rules. Like in any regime people could bend the rules or follow them to the letter. It all depended on the specific situation and the people involved.

Like everything else, context was very important.

There were amateur radio operators in the Eastern Bloc countries, with equipment capable of transmitting a signal to the opposite side of the Earth on a good day. But they were licensed by the government, and were aware that their activities were being watched.

The old regime really hated not having control over you. That was the most important thing. As long as they knew what you were doing, and approved, they were fine with almost anything.

I've built a few low-power FM transmitters back then, and I was aware of the possible dangers. It was more of a high-schooler's hobby. But teenagers like to push boundaries anyway.

It depends where you lived during the regime, some parts of the soviet union had stricter controls over communications than others. I got arrested for having few pairs of jeans.

In other parts for having long hair (when it was popular in the West) or for listening to foreign stations, music etc.

While that sort of thing was seen as being "too western" in the east, it was seen as being "queer" or "communist" in the west. The cold war era was very weird on both sides of the wall.

Having visited the USSR in the 1980s I can well imagine the problems you experienced (I traded duty-free shopping bags rather than jeans).

On the other hand, it's misleading to draw too many inferences from extreme cases. I was arrested recently for having a bag of very ordinary picket signs while not being anywhere near a political demonstration in time or space, but the repression in question was local in scope.

> I traded duty-free shopping bags rather than jeans

What did you get for them?

Military clothing. Tourists could visit department stores like GUM but were forbidden to purchase anything that was part of an official uniform like hats, boots, medals etc. Additionally, all outgoing baggage was x-rayed because you weren't supposed to take out money or forbidden items, but the people operating the X-ray machines didn't care even though it was perfectly obvious that I and everyone else in my high school group was smuggling out such material.

I wore a red army belt buckle on my jeans for years afterwards. I think it's still sitting in my friend's attic in Amsterdam.

Reselling Western goods such as jeans that weren't available in stores is a very different story.

FWIW shared phone lines and long waits were standard in the UK too, prior to ~1980.

I believe a combination of digital exchanges coming in and the privatisation of British Telecom fixed it.

> And most likely you will end up on a "coupled" line, meaning that you and your neighbor will share the same line

That was a thing indeed, but it was not "most likely", not even close.

It seems like that would depend on the era we're talking about. Party lines were a thing in the US, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony) That suggests they were still in widespread use in the 1970s. One imagines that other countries had them for longer yet.

While researching another topic in newspaper archives I recently came across a piece from the late '50s lamenting the number of people in Albuquerque, NM who were still on 4- and even 10-home party lines. By the time of the editorial this was already uncommon in cities (the point of the editorial was to complain that the Bell System had been very slow in upgrading Albuquerque), but at that time it was still very common outside of the few major cities in NM.

Right, it was probably just a symptom for the growth pains of the telecom industry. I would assume that industry had a whole range of extra issues in the Eastern Bloc, beyond the shall we say "natural" challenges of wiring up a whole territory.

In 1984 I recall ordering a phone line in Denver and being asked if I wanted a party line or a single line. My apartment was in Denver-proper and having a party line was still an option in 1984.

We briefly had a 9-line party line at my parent's house in upstate NY in 1989. Their building of the house prompted the local bell to install private lines.

They lived in the country, but not in an usually isolated area. 100% of the areas in rural areas had these in that region until the late 70s.

Some of the infrastructure was just retrofitted to provide private line service. I saw wood based mechanical switches in production (in very isolated areas in New York) circa 1997.

We had a 'party line' (same as what you're talking about) in rural Alberta Canada, 1/2 hour from a city of 3/4 million and not remote -- until the late 80s.

This was not a feature of a surveillance state, but an infrastructure cost/deployment issue.

Made BBS culture quite challenging for me. :-)

Incidentally, my neighbours had a portable phone that had the same frequency as mine, I could also frequently listen in on their calls too. This was about 25+ years ago. They might have been able to hear mine too. They weren't very interesting so I was never worried about it.

>"Coupled"

We call them party lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

Mostly phased out by 90s.

In the USA, these were called Party Lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com