To answer some of the questions subscribers are asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, organizes and writes its news

Walter Graebner took off this week for Russia.

Before he went they inoculated him against tetanus, typhoid, typhus, smallpox, cholera, yellow fever. The nine shots in rapid-fire almost floored him.

He went by Clipper the long way round--across the Atlantic and up through Russia's threatened backdoor. Next winter he hopes to come out again through Turkestan and Siberia. By then the outcome of the whole war may well have been decided on the steppes--and Graebner will have played a vital part in keeping its story in TIME clear and knowing and authentic.

This is the first time Walter Graebner has been to Russia, but Russia is almost the only place in Europe where he has not been since he started work for TIME in 1931. He has followed the news into Warsaw, Berlin. Prague, Paris, Budapest, Bucharest. He has interviewed newsmakers in Rome, Barcelona, Lisbon, Istanbul, Ankara, Jerusalem, Cairo.

He was in Vienna during the tragic days of the Anschluss, when Hitler's tanks and troops paraded endlessly through the silent streets--had his bags Gestapoed at the hotel every day for four days running by a Himmler agent with the odd habit of leaving little chromium swastikas as calling cards.

He interviewed General Weygand in Syria--went to Egypt to see the defenses of Suez and to appraise King Farouk's loyalty to Britain--was caught by the great earthquake at far-away Erzincan on the Euphrates while he and Margaret Bourke-White were photo-reporting their way through Turkey.

Since 1939 Graebner has been chief of the TIME and LIFE London BureauQ+argest maintained by any U.S. publisher in England. He ran the office all through the Battle of Britain--the toughest six months of news coverage any TIME man has ever known. He still can't figure out why he wasn't killed when a loaded Junkers bomber crashed almost on his doorstep; the terrific explosion blew his housekeeper from one room right through the door into another, bashed in the whole house. After that Graebner slept in the office-beside his desk on nights when the bombings were light-in the basement shelter when they were bad.

Somehow, through the bursting bombs, roaring planes and racing fire engines, he and his staff of twelve managed to keep a steady stream of on-the-spot news flowing across the Atlantic. These Graebner reports of how the Nazis dished it out and the British took it in the Battle of Britain will long be remembered as some of the most vivid, authentic reporting ever to appear in TIME.

Last January Graebner returned to the U.S. aboard a British cruiser. On the way over he got a dramatic sea-level view of the Battle of the Atlantic, for 26 U-boats were plotted on the ship's course between Ireland and Newfoundland. Since then he has been writing his personal knowledge and experiences into TIME'S Foreign News--and getting reacquainted with his family with whom he has spent only 14 weeks in the past two and a half years.

His new assignment is likely to be the toughest yetZJne that might well stump a less experienced war correspondent. There will be fighting all along a vast, shifting, 2,000-mile front from Archangel to the Black Sea. But Graebner's main work will be behind the lines, to see and report on as much of the Soviet Union as he can--and thus to help TIME'S readers toward a better understanding of this new Russia, which is battling 4,000,000 Nazis on one front and immobilizing a million Japs on the other.

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