In the last two decades the Soviet Union has definitively entered the age of television. Although a Petersburg engineer allegedly “laid the foundation of television” (by designing the cathode ray tube!) as far back as the beginning of the century, and a Russian engineer in Uzbekistan reportedly transmitted the image of a human face in 1928, the Soviets lagged well behind the Western world in the development of the new medium through the 1950s. In 1960, however, the Central Committee of the Communist party declared that “television, along with the press and radio broadcasting, is called upon to play an important role in the education of Soviet people in the spirit of communist principles [ideinost'] and morality, of intransigence toward bourgeois ideology and morality, [and] in the mobilization of the workers …. “ Thereafter, Soviet television progressed at a rapid rate. Between 1961 and 1975, the number of television receivers in the country increased more than eleven-fold. The enormous Ostankino Center in Moscow was built to serve as the main production and transmission base, and a network of cables, relay stations and earth satellites was established to carry broadcasts to the far corners of the Union.