TELEGRAPH. Working in St. Petersburg from 1852, when the first long-distance St. Petersburg - Moscow line was opened (before this, the optical telegraph was used for operational communication). The 1st Russian Main Telegraph Station was founded in 1855 (in the building of the Main Admiralty; in 1862 it moved to 15 Pochtamtskaya St.; later it was renamed the Telegraph Centre, TC). Large-scale construction of telegraph lines, connecting St. Petersburg with different cities and towns throughout Russia, began in the 2nd half of the 19th century. In 1865, teletypes, the first letter-printing telegraph devices, began operating on the line between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Photo telegraphs started working between Leningrad and Moscow in 1929. A telegraph network in Leningrad was created In the 1930s; A.F. Shorin, L.I. Treml, N.A. Volkov, and others contributed significantly to its installation. Special detachments and units were formed during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, providing uninterrupted telegraph connection from besieged Leningrad to the continent. An automatic network of customer telegraph lines of communication (AT) was created in Leningrad in the mid-1950s; an automatic network of lines of communication for the Ministry of Communication's central and local post offices was added in the early 1960s. The United Station of Telegraph Line Communication for AT was introduced in 1974; the Centre for Computer Message Communication opened in 1980; electromechanical teletypes were first widely used in the mid-1980s. TC processes correspondence between Ministry of Communication enterprises, provides telegraph connection and data transfer to any Russian town, and participates in processing international telegrams and communication using Telex, Gentex and other networks. New information technologies, including Internet access, are currently being actively introduced.

I. A. Bogdanov.