Despite the Iron Curtain and the familiar Soviet passion for secrecy in its affairs, a good deal of news can be gotten out of Russia. But it takes digging. That is why TIME has a "Russian Desk," whose three members spend their time winnowing facts from the Russian chaff. Last week's Background For War story in TIME on Russia's war potential was a good example of the nature of their work.

When Peter Ehlers, Foreign News writer and head of the Russian Desk, was asked last July to prepare this major study of the Russian economy, he turned first to TIME'S own extensive files on the subject. They are the repository of every hard fact that Ehlers and his associates, Mark Vishniak and Vera Kovarsky, have been able to glean from their painstaking weekly analysis of Soviet publications, official reports, government directives and statistics, from our correspondents and other sources.

As the laborious job of constructing a picture of Russia's present strength slowly took shape, our Washington bureau went to work. TIME reporters spent hours with Government economists, intelligence analysts, Russian experts in the Commerce, Agriculture and State Departments. Other important bits of information were added by independent scholars at the Russian Research centers at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford universities.

The Russian Desk's endless reading of Soviet publications often seems a waste of time. Newspapers like Izvestia, the official government daily, and Pravda, the Communist Central Committee's daily, offer more propaganda than enlightenment Economic publications like Planned Economy, monthlies like Soviet State and Law, periodicals like Culture and Life and the Literary Gazette are more likely to run a Stalin homily than information useful to foreigners. But patience is usually rewarded. Vishniak, for instance, noted one day that Pravda had expanded from four pages to six. The extra two pages, he soon found out, were devoted to a learned controversy over a system of philology founded by the late Nikolai

Marr, who advocated one universal language, not necessarily Russian, for World Communism. From long experience Vishniak sat back to see which way the Marxian doctrinal ax would fall. His vigilance was rewarded by an 8,000-word blockbuster in Pravda from Stalin himself, demolishing the "false" foundations of the Marr theory and setting everybody straight. It also made a story for TIME'S July 3 issue--and another example of the editors' continuing attempt to convey the ways of the Soviet to TIME'S readers.

The Russian Desk also has a special reference library--starting with a complete set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, whose 65 volumes were removed from Russia by one of our former Moscow bureau chiefs. The first of these useful volumes was printed in 1926, the last in 1947, and complete sets in U.S. private hands are rare. They are especially handy for documenting Soviet life and thought. Even the personal fortunes of the Russian editors of the first volume are instructive: all but one have died, been killed, imprisoned or have disappeared.

These hazards of Soviet life are familiar to our Russian Desk. Although Ehlers was graduated from Princeton in 1931 with a physics degree, he decided not to pursue the subject ("It's too lonesome a job"). Instead, he became a reporter for the Philadelphia Record. During his 15 years as a newspaperman, he specialized in economics, labor and world communism. He came to TIME two years ago from the New York Herald Tribune. Vishniak was born and educated in Moscow, where he became a law professor at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. After the Bolshevik revolution he fled to France and, from 1920 to 1940, taught international law and edited a Russian-language quarterly in Paris. Miss Kovarsky, who was born in Russia and educated in France, was assistant economics editor for a French news agency. She came to the U.S. after the Nazi invasion of France.

Cordially yours,

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