DEPORTING from Moscow is--like piecing together a delicate mosaic," notes TIME Bureau Chief Jerrold Schecter. "Rumors, tips, observations and the dogged detail of the official press, form the pattern." Indeed, for Schecter, the patterns for this week's cover story on Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev and the Russian military began to form soon after he arrived in the Soviet capital 20 months ago.

Despite the military's extreme sensitivity, Schecter gained an understanding by assiduously studying the press, attending parades in Red Square and checking military bookstores for new regulations, articles and speeches. "One talks to former soldiers and friends, reads memoirs and learns about military life-styles by watching officers shopping, meeting them while traveling, at diplomatic receptions or seeing who has a chauffeur and who takes the bus."

This holds true for all other reporting as well. Western journalists are only allowed to meet top officials under carefully controlled circumstances. Yet Schecter and Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who joined the bureau last September, found the leaders' TV appearances and play in the press invaluable as indicators. After receiving a coveted invitation to the Lenin memorial celebrations, Schecter bought a pair of 6 x 24 binoculars in order to get a better look at Politburo members from the foreign press balcony. "A Kremlinologist could construct a whole theory of leadership," reports Schecter, "on the basis of who talked to whom, who frowned, who rubbed his eyes or who pulled his earphones out during what speech." But this, of course, is only one small part of the constant search for a new fact, clarification, nuance or hint of change.

The assessments from Moscow were bolstered by Correspondents William Mader in Vienna and Benjamin Cate in Bonn. In Washington, Correspondents Jerry Hannifin and John Mulliken drew extensively on U.S. Government sources; in New York, our Russian desk added fur ther expertise. The actual stories were put together under the di rection of Senior Editor Ronald Kriss. The piece on Russia's political and socio-economic climate was written by William Doerner, while David Tinnin completed the mosaic with the report on the military.

We believe that the eight pages of color photographs illustrating this week's issue will be of more than usual interest to readers. Three of the four pages showing the Soviet armed forces on maneuver have never been published in the West. A Washington film distributor recently obtained rights to a Soviet documentary film and allowed us to re-photograph selections from it. In THE NATION, photos for the two pages on Earth Day were shot in eight cities across the country on Wednesday and ready for the presses Thursday. Finally, SCIENCE car ries two pages of pictures taken by Apollo 13's astronauts shortly after Commander Lovell's fateful "I believe we've had a problem here."

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