Beginning July 17 Werth will be the Times Moscow correspondent. (Maybe he already is, but the first piece to appear here is 7/17.) I don't know what happened to Ralph Parker.
I will look forward to Werth’s contributions. Werth had an interesting life. He was a British citizen raised in St. Petersburg. He had ties to the early communists, and was probably at least a communist sympathizer himself. This gave him great credibility with the Soviets, and during the war they gave him access that many other western journalists could only dream about. He was allowed to tour Stalingrad even before all the German POW’s had been removed. He had a really stark description of one of them scurrying from his stinking hole, shitting in a frozen pool of excrement, and then scurrying back. Later this month, he will tour Kursk, and will be able to enjoy the stench of rotting unburied bodies in the Ukraine summer miles away before his aircraft lands.
While Werth was a communist sympathizer, he had no love for Stalin and despised Beria. Of course, he wrote this in “Russia at War” during the time Khruschev was belittling Stalin, and Khruschev hated Beria too. But a lot of influential and common Russians trusted Werth, and were very open to him.
Again, his articles will be very well worth the read, a real star to the Times lineup.