One bit of interesting history about the hotel I stayed in in Tallinn. On the flight to Tallinn, I happened to be skimming through the airline magazine when I saw a story entitled “The secret lives of Tallinn Hotels,” with a full-page picture of the Sokos Hotel Viru on the opposite page. This just happened to be the hotel in which the conference was going to take place, so I read on. I learned that in Soviet times the Sokos Hotel was formerly the Intourist Hotel, the infamous state hotel which every sizable city had, and where foreign guests were housed. According to the article, Tallinn’s Intourist Hotel was quite well known – it was the first “skyscraper” in Tallinn (22 floors) and was perhaps one of the “most luxurious” hotels in the USSR. Of course, it came complete with bugged rooms, especially on the 14th floor where important guests stayed, and a room full of KGB personnel to monitor those important people. The KGB room was located out of reach of guests on the 23rd floor. However, when the political tides began to turn in the late ‘80s, the KGB simply deserted their post in the hotel. They left behind their electronic equipment, some clothing and random items, including an overflowing ashtray. Rather than clean out the KGB room, the hotel management decided to leave everything as it was. And so the author of the article paid a visit to the room to glimpse a bit of Soviet history frozen in time, and wrote that any guest could request to see the room and would be escorted there.
So the day after I arrived, several of my fellow conference attendees approached the desk and asked to see the KGB room. The receptionist called someone on the phone, and unfortunately, the answer was no. Her English didn’t seem to be good enough to explain why, either. So we went looking for the room on our own. The elevator only took us as far as the 22nd floor, so we wandered around until we found a maid and she directed us to an unlocked door and a flight of stairs. Two walls on the 23rd floor were mostly made of windows, and the other two walls each had two doors. We tried the handles on each one, and they were all locked. And that’s pretty much the anti-climactic ending to my story. Behind one of those doors was the KGB room, full of Soviet paraphernalia, but we never saw it. We considered pestering the front desk staff further, but in the end never got around to it. So however mistaken the airline magazine writer was about guests visiting the KGB room, it was still interesting to learn the history behind the modern, well-decorated building we were staying in. From its current looks, I never would’ve guessed it had been a legendary Soviet hotel.
Laura
