There was something about the number of telephone lines in a country that greatly appealed to communist governments. The number was one of the favored "indexes of civilization." The figures could be proclaimed at a Communist Party congress and used as evidence of how Soviet life had swerved into the fast lane and was rapidly overtaking the capitalist West.


Ever-increasing numbers of telephones in Russia had great campaign value. Until 1991 it was the declared policy of the Soviet Communications Ministry to provide a telephone in every home at some time in the next century. The policy was basically to tell people to wait and not worry: Everyone would eventually have a telephone.


This was very much like Mikhail Gorbachev's promise of a home for every family by the year 2000: unrealistic, but too far in the future for anyone to question seriously.


Like all Soviet statistics, the numbers were of course distorted. When looking at the number of telephone lines per 100 people in Russia, the statistics included lines on which a single line served two dwellings.


Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, waiting lists for home telephones have become something of a joke in most of Russia. As the official cost of a new line is quite low, the local telephone company loses money by installing one. In effect the only people able to get new lines are now those willing to pay high prices for them. People wanting private or business lines have to bribe and cajole local telephone exchanges. Any systematic control over this process seems to have completely disappeared.


Yet the obsession with the number of connections still survives. This week, Communications Minister Vladimir Bulgak said there would be a million new telephone lines installed in 1995, many under a new program called "The People's Telephone."


The People's Telephone is an attempt to meet the huge demand for new telephone lines. Perhaps hoping for the levels of enthusiasm generated by private-sector share schemes, the ministry and the government are issuing a kind of voucher. Everyone who buys a People's Telephone voucher by the spring is guaranteed a new telephone by the end of the year. The connection fee will be somewhere between the current commercial and noncommercial rates.


Only time will tell whether this project will turn out to be more than a populist gamble. It could fall flat on its face, if the massive amounts of money needed to enable most city telephone networks to deliver on the promise are not raised.


According to Bulgak, the idea of The People's Telephone was chosen as an alternative to raising local telephone tariffs -- which he said would be inefficient, given the limited resources of most Russian households.


This is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Line connection fees are insignificant compared to the income generated even by low telephone tariffs. Without them, telephone networks across the country will still not have enough money to provide subscribers with a proper service.


But the problem goes deeper. The quest for lines is in itself misguided. In a modern economy, the goal should be how well you utilize and service what lines you have. It make no sense to add new lines for people who cannot afford to use them.


During the next decade, the Russian international and intercity operator Rostelekom plans a massive investment in the trunk network to link together Russia's major population centers with fiber optic cables. The city of Moscow will soon benefit from some large investments by several foreign operators, which could dramatically improve service to certain areas. Since these millions of dollars will have to be recouped from Russian telephone subscribers, surely it makes sense to stop playing the numbers game. It would be much better if this well-publicized effort to add a million new lines were to be redirected toward simply bringing some order to the process of getting a new telephone line.





Robert Farish is the editor of Computer Business Russia. Fax: (7 095) 198-6207. Internet : farish@glas.apc.org.