For TIME'S chief European correspondent William Rademaekers, this week's Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe is the most recent in a 20-year series of cold war "thaws" and crises that he has covered. Arriving in Europe in 1955 at the time of the spirit of Geneva, the first of the elusive efforts at superpower detente, Rademaekers, who speaks fluent Hungarian, was soon covering the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Like other Western journalists in the late '50s he could not get visas for Eastern European countries. When the cold war eased in the mid-'60s he found visas often did not help much. While working on a cover story on President Nicolae Ceausescu, Rademaekers spent three weeks in Rumania and could not "get within ten feet of a high party official." Needing some descriptive details for a cover portrait (TIME, March 18, 1966), he asked a Rumanian press officer for help. What color, for example, were Ceausescu's eyes? The officer did not know. Nor did he know anyone who did know. "He wouldn't ask," says Rademaekers. "He couldn't ask. Finally, in total frustration I cabled New York to color them a safe, Communist red." Detente has already eased such problems of communication. "We can see deputy premiers and foreign ministers easily these days," Rademaekers reports, "and even look at their eyes."

Bonn Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan went to Helsinki in mid-July to find out in advance the schedule for the hectic 54 hours of the summit. Thus he got a head start on most of the 2,000 journalists expected to cover the event. "There will be 35 heads of state here," cabled Nelan, "and they are meeting not only as a group but also in a crisscrossing web of bilateral talks. It seems likely that no one will know exactly what went on until some time after it's over." Keeping tabs on the receptions, breakfasts, lunches and secret rendezvous is one problem Nelan is prepared to cope with. Among the others: "snarled schedules, traffic jams, overzealous security men, angry reporters and stupefied hoteliers."

While Europe's diplomats meet to consecrate detente, dissident Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov offers some cogent reservations about the process in a recently completed essay, My Country and the World. Excerpts from it accompany our cover story. They were selected by TIME'S State Department correspondent Strobe Talbott, whose previous credits include translating two volumes of Khrushchev Remembers (Little, Brown & Co.), including his The Last Testament in 1974.

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