Russian-language version of that article has more details. It's been widely used until early 90s by taxists, bus drivers, firefighters, emergency services, etc,

Russian-language version of that article has more details. It's been widely used until early 90s by taxists, bus drivers, firefighters, emergency services, etc, but was unencrypted and had too little capacity for individual use, and also no possibility for billing. It wasn't a handheld device either. The replacement was in the plans, but the Soviet Union crashed and there was no money to develop the new system, so everyone just switched to GSM.