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[In 1932–33 Malcolm Muggeridge was a foreign correspondent in Moscow for The Manchester Guardian. The following is an excerpt from his memoir, Many Winters Ago in Moscow.]

In the mornings we thumbed over the day’s newspapers, spelling them out ourselves or with the help of a secretary. They were inconceivably long-winded and flat—enormous, turgid articles about the Five-Year Plan or the collectivisation of agriculture. I used in those days to nourish the hope that the Soviet regime would collapse under the weight of its sheer tedium. No human beings, I would reflect, not even Slavs, could indefinitely sustain this boredom of portentous words, these unillumined sentences meandering down column after column, this endless repetition of the same slogans and propositions. How wrong I was! There is, as I now know, no limit to what contemporary human beings will endure, in what is written, spoken, or visually presented to them, however repetitious, long-winded, and inherently false it may be. The more they venerate literacy, the greater becomes their capacity for suffering gladly any amount of boredom in terms of words and images; the more they persuade themselves that facts and figures can explain their circumstances, the greater is their credulity and tolerance of charlatanry.

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