Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan is accustomed to covering diplomatic affairs, but in recent weeks he played diplomat as well as painstakingly negotiating the final details of a meeting with Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. Nelan was successful, and last Tuesday he and a team of TIME journalists joined Brezhnev in his Kremlin office to conduct the extraordinary discussion that is part of this week's cover story. Never before had the party chief held a private interview with members of an American news organization.

A graduate of Columbia University's Russian Institute and a former State Department correspondent for TIME, Nelan is an expert on Soviet affairs who knows how slowly and carefully the Kremlin's bureaucracy usually moves. But Nelan's latest assignment demonstrated how swiftly that same bureaucracy can function when the word is passed by its highest echelons. Within hours after permission for the interview was suddenly granted, visas were ready at the Soviet embassy in Washington for Corporate Editor Henry Grunwald and Managing Editor Ray Cave. Chief of Correspondents Richard Duncan received his summons to Moscow while in Jordan on another assignment. No problem: a telegram from Moscow to Amman was all that was needed to clear Duncan's entry into the Soviet Union.

On the morning of the interview, Brezhnev formally gave his guests a red leather folder containing his prepared answers to those questions that had been submitted in advance and then answered additional questions from TIME'S delegation. The contents of the folder became an immediate souvenir for Nelan; the answers were typed in Russian, with Brezhnev's signature on the last page.

Nelan was greatly helped in organizing the meeting by TIME'S Felix Rosenthal, a resident of Moscow and a Soviet citizen, who reports that the week had more stress and excitement than any other he has experienced since starting with Time Inc. in 1963. Said Rosenthal: "Representing an American organization puts me between the hammer and the sickle." As for Nelan, he was left with one lasting impression. Working out the protocol and the complications of the interview, he says diplomatically, "gave me new insights into the problems of finishing up the SALT treaty."

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