pay phone story

Payphone Story – Global History of Payphones and Phone Booths

Russian Payphone- Series A Komarovsky-system payphone

The Komarovsky-system Series A, introduced in 1932, was the first Soviet fully automatic payphone. Manufactured initially by Kaluga Factory No. 1 and later Krasnaya Zarya in Leningrad, it used a rotary dial and accepted a 10-kopeck coin, which could be returned if the call failed.

Name	Series A Komarovsky-system payphone
Date	1932
Manufacturer	Kaluga Factory No. 1 of the People’s Commissariat of Communications, with later production undertaken by the Krasnaya Zarya (Red Dawn) factory in Leningrad
Link	The German Münzfernsprecher 26 that is was based on.

Series A Komarovsky-system payphone

The Komarovsky-system payphone was a landmark in Soviet telecommunications, representing the USSR’s first domestically produced fully automatic payphone designed for use with automatic telephone exchanges. Developed in 1932, it was manufactured as the Series “A” (Серия А) by Kaluga Factory No. 1 of the People’s Commissariat of Communications, with later production undertaken by the Krasnaya Zarya (Red Dawn) factory in Leningrad. The surviving example illustrated in the A. S. Popov Central Museum of Communications collection dates from 1933.

The design emerged during the rapid modernisation of Soviet telephone networks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when new automatic exchanges required payphones capable of operating without an exchange operator. Its design was based on German developments of the late 1920s.

Unlike earlier Russian public telephones, which often consisted of conventional telephone instruments connected to separate coin boxes, the Komarovsky incorporated a rotary dial and automatic coin-payment mechanism into a purpose-built apparatus. A local call cost 10 kopecks, and importantly, the telephone included a compartment for returning the coin when a call could not be completed.

The Series A established the basic pattern for subsequent Soviet payphones. It was followed by improved Series B and Series V models, while Series A instruments remained in service until the early 1950s.