To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

The hardest place in the allied world to get background news out of is Russia. Reports of major battles come through all right -- but the intimate facts about the Russian worker and about Russia's industrial mobilization have been closely guarded secrets since before Stalin came into power.

Only one American journalist I know of ever set out in overalls to make a life work of getting the truth about what the great Communist experiment is doing to Russian life. His name is John Scott; he is back in this country now as one of the Foreign News editors of TIME; and his story is so interesting that I was sure you would like to hear it.

Scott made up his mind to find out the real truth about the Soviets while he was still at the University of Wisconsin. He figured a good factory worker would be a lot more welcome in Russia than another foreign journalist--so after college he went to the General Electric works at Schenectady and earned his certificate as a master electric welder. He took out a union card here, sailed for Russia--and then went to college all over again to learn the language there.

By September 1932 he was ready to tackle his first job--helping to build Siberian Magnitogorsk into a Russian Pittsburgh. He worked three years as a welder, then two years more as a chemist in a coke and chemical by-products plant. He became completely at home among the Russians and married a Russian girl--a teacher of mathematics. Russian is still the language usually spoken in his home in New York--but Mrs. Scott can speak English now and she is mighty glad to be on this side of the Atlantic.

At Magnitogorsk Scott saw factories rise out of the mud--watched a town of 2,000 mushroom into Russia's largest iron and steel stronghold, with an annual production of close to 3,000,000 tons. "Building Magnitogorsk from the ground up caused more casualties than the Battle of the Marne," he says. The story of that tremendous enterprise and its terrific toll in human lives and effort is in his first book, Beyond the Urals.

Scott's second book was published just the other day. Its title is Duel for Europe, and it tells the inside story of Soviet policy during the two years before Hitler tore up his pact with Stalin and the Nazis marched into Russia. (The New York Times says Scott's unique knowledge of the Russian life and language makes this book "a work of first-rate importance" --and the New York Herald Tribune adds that while "ambassadors and military experts had a chance to see one side of the picture, John Scott--working and living with the Russian people--knew more than most of them.")

But Scott is an author second and a newspaperman first. The last three years he was in Russia he worked for the New York Times, the sober London News Chronicle, the French news agency Havas--worked for them almost too zealously, it seems, because just two weeks before the German invasion he was kicked out of the Soviet Union for telling too much a little too soon. (He tipped the news that all was not well between Hitler and Stalin in a series of articles smuggled across the border by "rabbits"--traveling diplomats who mailed the stories to his newspaper from neutral Stockholm.)

Scott came back home the hard way--via Japan--cabled several stories to TIME from Tokyo--went to work for us as soon as he had finished writing his books.

And with the Red Armies looming larger and larger in the news ever since--and the Soviet censors continuing to show foreign news men only the surface of things--our editors are finding John Scott, welder and student, a tremendously valuable co-worker in giving depth and authenticity and human understanding to their stories about the Russian war effort behind the front.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.