In many places you can read about the veto that Joseph Stalin imposed on the resolution to modernize telephone communications in the country. The text of the ban is also given: “This will destroy everything that we have created with such difficulty. It is difficult to imagine a more convenient tool for counter-revolution and conspirators than this.” We checked whether Stalin wrote this.
The above-mentioned quote from Stalin is given in the publication of the Kommersant Money magazine dated August 7, 2002, among a number of interesting facts about telephones. That's what it is said:
“By 1913, the telephone network covered a significant part of the European part of the country; up to 200 conversations were carried out daily on the St. Petersburg-Moscow intercity highway alone. And then the war began, which turned into a series of revolutions, and the task of installing telephones in the country was postponed for decades.
The attitude of the Bolsheviks to Bell’s invention is clearly demonstrated not only by the “Hello, young lady? Please, Smolny!”, which was repeated many times in films, but also by Stalin’s curious visa-veto. On a project to modernize telephone communications in the country, the leader wrote the following: “This will destroy everything that we have created with such difficulty. It is difficult to imagine a more convenient tool for the counter-revolution and conspirators.”
Similar information can be read in one of the issues of the magazine “System administrator", in the children's online encyclopedia Claw.ru and a number of other sources. In the newspaper "Northern region“It is clarified that the resolution rejected by Stalin was proposed by Trotsky.
To begin with, I would like to trace the path of the quote. Looking ahead, let's say that it turned out to be relatively short. The earliest mention of Stalin's words on the Internet dates back to December 16, 2000 in the next collection of facts about the phone on the portal KM.RU. And nothing - in printed publications of the Soviet era. There is a possibility that the portal’s authors gleaned information from the popular encyclopedia “I Explore the World. Inventions", first published in the same year 2000 (author - Alexander Leonovich):
But before 2000, there was nothing similar, and this makes us think about the origin of the quote in the first post-Soviet years, rich in conspiracy literature and poor in terms of quality book publishing.
Now let's look at the facts. On the one hand, some works You can find out that in the first Soviet years, the country's telephone installation did not proceed at an accelerated pace:
“In Soviet historiography, the opinion has been established that the processes of restoring communications to the pre-revolutionary level were completed by 1926. Calculations of per capita telecommunications services showed that recovery processes were slow. In terms of the number of letters per year, the pre-revolutionary level was reached only in 1929. The telephone penetration rate of the USSR at the turn of the 20s and 30s was only 0.15 telephones per hundred inhabitants, that is, it remained less than before the revolution. Only in 1931 this figure was five points higher than the level of 1914.”
A different impression emerges from articles about the history of the Moscow City Telephone Network (MGTS):
“For the sake of fairness, we note that the Bolsheviks did the most to install telephones in the capital - the latest technical solutions appeared in our country, although late, unlike world practice, but they worked for a long time and reliably. Fast and reliable communications were given great importance - the first contract with the Swedish Ericsson in the early 20s was supervised by I.V. Stalin himself. It was then, starting in 1930, that the company supplied the first automatic telephone exchanges to Moscow.”
Similar information is confirmed by Leonid Parfenov in his project “The other day":
“The state monopolist restored the pre-revolutionary level of the industry by 1929. Communications is not an industry, but an infrastructure, even a service, and it is being developed belatedly. Only in 1930, the first automatic telephone exchange with 8,000 numbers, produced by the Krasnaya Zarya plant (formerly Ericsson), was launched in Moscow.
The telephone is valued by the authorities as a means of control. Remaining a household curiosity even in big cities, the devices are installed primarily in public places: various offices, directorates, as well as at the place of residence of their leaders, so that instructions can be conveyed or a report requested at any time. By the end of the 1920s, 7,000 village councils were equipped with telephones, in the mid-1930s - about 30,000. In communal apartments in megacities, telephones have been installed since tsarist times, when these houses were profitable. A separate apartment with a telephone means belonging to the Soviet nomenklatura: a boss or a figure of science, technology, or culture recognized by his superiors. A business call is much more significant than a face-to-face conversation, and in Grigory Alexandrov’s new comedy “Volga-Volga,” a district bureaucrat shouts to a janitor from the balcony: “Pick up the phone! I’ll talk to you on the phone.”
Leon Trotsky himself in the book “My Life” makes it clearthat the leadership valued the role of the telephone in the state machine:
“The ideological struggle was replaced by administrative mechanics: telephone calls from the party bureaucracy to meetings of workers’ cells, frantic congestion of cars, blaring horns, well-organized whistles and roars when oppositionists appeared on the podium. The ruling faction pressed with mechanical concentration of its forces and the threat of repression.”
In addition, in many sources You can read about the Soviet leader’s reverent attitude towards Bell’s invention: “Stalin loved the telephone almost mystically. He had been his most devoted and indispensable assistant since the turbulent revolutionary years. <…> The beginning of Stalin’s active work in the party and in the country coincided with the rapid development of telephone communications. And the leader appreciated it with all Eastern wisdom and foresight. If you like, Joseph Stalin won the long and protracted struggle with Leon Trotsky solely with the help of a telephone.”
As for a specific resolution that would have been aimed at increasing the level of telephone penetration in the country and would have been rejected by Stalin, there is no information about such cases in open sources.
What conclusion can be drawn from all this? Perhaps at the very dawn of socialism, the modernization of the telephone network in the Soviet state was not proceeding at the best pace, but it accelerated significantly in the second half of the 1920s. However, there is no evidence of artificial barriers on the part of the authorities in this process. Moreover, from biographical materials about Stalin it follows that he had an extremely positive assessment of the role of telephone communications in the country. Taking into account the absence of the quote we are considering in sources before 1991, we can conclude that the episode with Stalin and Trotsky is fictitious.
Fake
Read on topic:
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
