A Letter From The Publisher, Mar. 23, 1953

This week's cover story on Russia's Premier Malenkov, and Stalin's appearance on TIME'S cover last week—for the tenth and presumably last time—illustrate some of the difficulties in covering the news from Russia these days. The facts of Stalin's death and Malenkov's succession were the most substantial pieces of news that have breached the Iron Curtain since World War II. But the full background of these facts had to be supplied by filling in a number of blank spaces.

Obviously, the way to fill in the blanks is different from the methods of getting news outside the Communist world, i.e., sending a...

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