Title kinda says it all.
Can the US president pick-up a phone and expect the president of Russia to answer? A literal direct line. No dialing needed. You pick up the phone and there is only one person on the other end who will answer.
There is a Moscow-Washington hotline. It’s not a phone, though; it’s more of an email system.
But whether there is an even more direct telephone line that links the White House straight to the Kremlin would probably be, I imagine, very secret and classified.
It’s hidden in the bust of Shakespeare.
As @Velocity’s link says, but I’ll say it here because too few people click on links, there never was a literal phone. Ever. It was a useful urban legend and a dandy device for fiction, though.
There was, however, a Teletype and later, fax machines.
That’s the point. Devices for better communication existed after the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the OP asked, “Can the US president pick-up a phone and expect the president of Russia to answer? A literal direct line. No dialing needed. You pick up the phone and there is only one person on the other end who will answer.” That answer is no. It came out of fiction, specifically the book that inspired Dr. Strangelove. The answer appears still to be no.
And, outside of fiction, the idea is kinda silly. Where would the phone be located? In movies it’s usually in the Oval Office, although it would be better suited for the Situation Room, but that’s a recent innovation. The Russian premier has an official office as well, but could be at any number of sites in a crisis. Besides, to my knowledge no modern U.S. president speaks Russian. A major reason for print communication was to avoid translation issues and provide a written, sharable record.
Please don’t tell me there is not a Cone of Silence.
mmm
Relax, I can assure you that’s every bit as real as shoe phones.
Roald Dahl borrowed the idea in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, where the president also has a porcelain phone for direct-dialing the premier of China.
But it’s not unlikely that the Russian president would speak English; Putin does.
Doesn’t he usually use a translator in talks with presidents? I have no idea how perfect his command of English is. Wouldn’t he also feel that it would be a sign of inequality if he spoke the American president’s language?
Can Putin speak English?
Vladimir Putin can speak English, but while his ability to speak the language is reported to be good, he is not fluent and rarely uses it publicly.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said in 2021: “He practically understands English completely and sometimes even corrects the translators.”
Mr Peskov told how hsi boss speaks English at the sidelines of summits, but uses a translator “during negotiations and when he is conducting an official meeting”.
I, of course, do not believe anything a Kremlin spokesperson says until confirmed elsewhere.
Here is a video of him speaking English. His German is supposedly better which makes sense since he was stationed in East Germany for years.
There’s surely a lot of that, and for sure a leader would feel more comfortable about not missing out on important nuances in their own native language. Then again, you never know how much is going on behind closed doors in global politics, so I wouldn’t find it so unlikely that there could be an off-the-record call that two leaders arrange among each other tossing aside issues of protocol.