The English dislike the telephone so much that they substitute numerous mail deliveries for it. The Russians use the telephone for a status symbol, like the alarm clock worn by tribal chiefs as an article of attire in Africa. The mosaic of the press image in Russia is felt as an immediate form of tribal unity and participation. Those features of the press that we find most discordant with austere individual standards of literary culture are just the ones that recommend it to the Communist Party. “A newspaper,” Lenin once declared, “is not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator;
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