«Commissars in dusty helmets» («комиссары в пыльных шлемах») is a direct quotation from «Sentimental March» («Сентиментальный марш,» 1957), one of the best-known songs of Bulat Okudzhava, the poet and singer-songwriter who essentially founded the Soviet «author’s song» (bard) tradition. The song imagines the singer falling in the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922, watched over in death by «commissars in dusty helmets,» bending silently over him. Decades later, the phrase remained instantly recognizable to any Russian reader as shorthand for the idealized, doomed generation of Bolshevik true believers — a suitably grand, faintly absurd comparison for a heavy old rotary telephone that has clearly not been dusted since roughly that era.