Newest Hotel Headache: 1,000 Dead Phone Lines

As if the Radisson Slavjanskaya did not have enough problems already, on Thursday all 1,000 city telephone lines in the riverfront hotel stopped working for about 12 hours.The failure occurred a day after the hotel readmitted an American joint-venture partner who had been barred for 12 days from the premises during a struggle over money and personalities. Two weeks ago, armed police made a criminal bust in the lobby.Hotel officials said a circuit board connecting the hotel to the city telephone system blew up early Thursday morning, cutting off both guests and the businesses and international news organizations which have their local headquarters in the building."This was a mechanical glitch; it has been repaired," said Mary Lou Johnston, the hotel's director of property management. "Nothing is fool-proof and there are mechanical breakdowns; this happened to be one of them. It had nothing to do with any of the circumstances that are going on right now." She was referring to the struggle between Radisson and Americom, the two American partners in the joint venture, with the Moscow City Property Committee. The American partners have accused each other of financial mismanagement, law breaking and other improprieties and the Russian side has been critical of both partners.The telephone problem was limited to the hotel and did not affect the surrounding Kievsky train-station area, according to Nikolai Savlukov, deputy director of the Moscow local telephone network. "It was only inside the hotel; nobody could call there from the city and they could not call out," he said. "It's their responsibility as it occurred on their equipment."Because of the relatively short period of disruption, guests did not receive any discount, hotel manager Richard Mason said.Caleb Daniloff contributed to this article.