Hotel Viru & KGB Museum
Soviet-era hotel whose sealed twenty-third floor hid a KGB radio room bugging sixty guest rooms.
This guide to Hotel Viru and its KGB Museum in Tallinn opens with the hotel's 1972 debut as the Soviet showcase that funneled nearly every Western tourist allowed into the city through one building, and the microphones hidden in its wallpaper, telephones, flowerpots, ashtrays and bread plates. You'll hear about the officially nonexistent floor above the hotel's own blueprints, sealed behind a steel door and holding a radio room built in 1975 with a direct line to Moscow. The guide follows that listening post through the final days of the Soviet Union in August 1991, when the people working it vanished in a single night. Stand in the stairwell where hotel staff finally worked up the nerve to climb up and look.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.