A Letter From The Publisher: may 15, 1964

FEW assignments are more frustrating and less rewarding for U.S. journalists than reporting from the Soviet Union. Because of restrictions that are applied and implied, a man on the spot there can contribute less, perhaps, than he can from any other major capital where U.S. correspondents are at work. In the years since World War II, TIME has tussled with this problem in many ways and has been out of Moscow more than it has been in. When Stalin’s ironhanded censorship tightened and our own reports were reduced to a useless trickle, we closed our Moscow bureau (1948). Then, as censorship began to ease under Khrushchev, we applied to reopen our office (1956) but were repeatedly turned down. The Soviets changed their minds and readmitted us (1958) but expelled one of our correspondents (1962) because they did not like his reporting on the Cuban missile crisis.

Two months ago, the Russians began a new chapter in their history with TIME. Correspondent Israel Shenker, our Moscow bureau chief since March 1963, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow and read a formal statement charging that our cover story on Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and the state of the Russian economy (Feb. 21) was “slanderous.” Unless we changed our approach, he was informed, our office would be closed. In a reply to the Foreign Ministry we said, in effect, that we intended to continue reporting the Soviet Union as we saw it. Last week Shenker was called to the Foreign Ministry again and heard TIME denounced in language almost identical to the earlier charge, this time about the cover story on Lenin and the split in the Communist bloc (April 24). Shenker was ordered “to leave the borders of the Soviet Union,” and our Moscow office was summarily closed.

Soviet officials have never been able to understand or accept or even get accustomed to our kind of reporting. They especially like coverage by reporters who use that frustrating and unrewarding technique of sending out just enough to stay in. What they read in their translations of TIME stories did not fit that pattern. Our stories on the Soviet Union come from a wide array of sources available to our writers and editors in New York and to our correspondents elsewhere around the world. Important among these is our Russian Desk in New York, staffed by specialists who work constantly at translating, studying and analyzing newspapers, magazines and a great deal of other information. From these many sources, plus press association coverage of day-to-day events, we will continue to report frankly and deeply on the Soviets despite last week’s reading-out of our correspondent.

MORE on the positive side is a statement that will be read to a TIME staffer this week. The Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Awards Committee is presenting one of its annual $2,500 awards to Medicine Writer Gilbert Cant for the cover story on surgery (May 3, 1963). It is the second Lasker award he has won; the other was for the virology cover story (Nov. 17, 1961). The committee cited the surgery story and the accompanying twelve pages of color pictures for “graphically portraying the skill of the modern surgical team . . . assessing and putting into perspective a range of lifesaving procedures so radical in concept that they were almost unimaginable a few years ago . . . combining dramatic color photography and art with excellence in writing on a subject of major importance.” The result, said the committee, was “a notable contribution to medical journalism.”