Railroads: 147,400 km total; 53,900 km electrified; does not include industrial lines (1989)

Highways: 1,757,000 km total; 1,310,600 km hard-surfaced (asphalt, concrete, stone block, asphalt treated, gravel, crushed stone); 446,400 km earth (1989)

Inland waterways: 123,700 km navigable, exclusive of Caspian Sea (1989)

Pipelines: 82,000 km crude oil and refined products; 206,500 km natural gas (1987)

Ports: St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Riga, Tallinn, Kaliningrad, Liepaja, Ventspils, Murmansk, Arkhangel'sk, Odessa, Novorossiysk, Il'ichevsk, Nikolayev, Sevastopol', Vladivostok, Nakhodka; inland ports are Astrakhan', Baku, Nizhniy Novgorod (Gor'kiy), Kazan', Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kuybyshev, Moscow, Rostov, Volgograd, Kiev

Merchant marine: 1,565 ships (1,000 GRT or over) totaling 15,243,228 GRT/20,874,488 DWT; includes 52 passenger, 898 cargo, 52 container, 11 barge carrier, 4 roll-on/float off cargo, 5 railcar carrier, 114 roll-on/roll-off cargo, 230 petroleum, oils, and lubricants (POL) tanker, 5 liquefied gas, 17 combination ore/oil, 4 specialized liquid carrier, 13 chemical tanker, 160 bulk; note--594 merchant ships are based in Black Sea, 366 in Baltic Sea, 398 in Soviet Far East, and 207 in Barents Sea and White Sea; the Soviet Union has been transferring merchant ships to a variety of flags of convenience; at the beginning of 1991 the USSR had 64 ships under foreign flags (Cyprus 52, Malta 7, Panama 2, Vanuatu 2, and Honduras 1)

Civil air: 4,000 major transport aircraft

Airports: 7,192 total, 4,607 usable; 1,163 with permanent-surface runways; 33 with runways over 3,659 m; 491 with runways 2,440-3,659 m; 661 with runways 1,220-2,439 m

Telecommunications: 37 million telephone subscribers; phone density of 37 per 100 households; urban phone density is 9.2 phones per 100 residents; rural phone density is 2.9 per 100 residents (June 1990); automatic telephone dialing with 70 countries and between 25 Soviet cities (April 1989); stations--457 AM, 131 FM, over 900 TV; 90 million TVs (December 1990)

NOTE: The information regarding Soviet Union on this page is re-published from the 1991 World Fact Book of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Soviet Union Communications 1991 information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Soviet Union Communications 1991 should be addressed to the CIA.