This week TIME'S Moscow office goes on a permanent basis.

Ever since Russia came into the war we have had top-flight correspondents there--first Walter Graebner, our No. 1 man in Europe; then Richard Lauterbach; and finally John Hersey. Each was a shrewd and trained observer who brought home with him a uniquely firsthand feel of Russia at war to share with our other editors --and to give authenticity to all our reports on that enigmatic country.

But this is something different. For Craig Thompson has gone to Moscow with every expectation of staying--to watch from start to finish the tremendous changes victory and peace are sure to bring to that land which is at once so old and so new, so like and so unlike our own.

The Soviet Embassy in Washington has asked Thompson, "When will your family join you?"--and the Thompsons hope it can be soon. Young Craig, 13, will go to school in Moscow, and he and his mother are both studying Russian on phonograph records. But travel to Russia is rugged these days even for a man. (Thompson went in an ATC plane that carried him across the Atlantic and the rim of Africa to Teheran, where the Russians picked him up and flew him over the Caucasus and into the Soviet Union. "The trip," he reported, "was cold, uncomfortable--and wonderful,")

TIME'S office in Moscow is a big room with a balcony on the fourth floor of the rambling old Metropole Hotel (ten minutes from the Foreign Office, five minutes from the Kremlin)--and Thompson will find the grind there tough. A correspondent in Moscow is likely to work long & hard, what with few Russian executives getting to their offices before two in the afternoon, and an appointment for eleven at night only too common.

This is an assignment that might stump a less experienced reporter--but Thompson, now 37, is a veteran foreign correspondent who started covering World War II almost from its beginning, during the Blitz in London. At home and abroad he worked 20 years for U.S. papers--gathered and wrote just about every kind of news "because I wanted to make myself an all around newsman." That background should stand him in good stead in Russia, where he will have to report not just diplomacy and war but the growth of a whole, new civilization.

Thompson will have able assistants in the two Russian girls who are part of TIME'S permanent staff in Moscow: dark-eyed, intelligent Nina Moustel and little Gallya the Courier, who is 21, has two children, and a husband in the Red Army she has not heard from in almost three years. Multilingual Nina (Russian, English, German, French) headed the staff of the scientific library at Moscow University before she became secretary to TIME-in-Moscow; Gallya's main job is to get our correspondent's reports to the Foreign Office for censoring (that takes anywhere from an hour to three days)--but another important duty is shopping for food at the diplomatic store (TIME'S correspondent is entitled to one meal a day at the press tables in the Metropole at the special price of $2 U.S.--has to have the others cooked in his rooms or buy them in a restaurant at a cost of 600 rubles apiece--$50 U.S.)

When Hersey was in Moscow his cables to TIME & LIFE ran as high as 16,425 words a week--enough to fill almost half of TIME. So a lot of news should be flowing across the Atlantic from Thompson and his staff from now on.

Cordially,

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