I’m not so sure that’s just a capitalistic thing, though, but more a characteristic of citizen-hostile regimes in general. The Soviet Union’s telecom infrastructure was highly centralized, and underinvestment in public telecom infrastructure was deliberate (as a way to control information flow). Communist Party apparatchiks had access to special phone networks, which, while they might be more reliable than the public network, were likely even more heavily monitored (shades of Orwell’s 1984, where the Outer Party members were more heavily surveilled than the proles). One could judge a person’s overall importance by how many phones were on the desk; apparently key sets weren’t a thing behind the Iron Curtain.
I was very surprised, back in the late 1980s, to see quite a number of USSR-based nodes in the FidoNet nodelist. With the Cold War still going on, though, I don’t think it was possible to directly dial calls between the USSR and USA, in either direction.
