A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

For TIME staff members, a breaking news story that requires coordinating coverage of events occurring in swift succession in several cities presents a special challenge. This week's dramatic story of the release and arrival in the West of Soviet Dissident Anatoli Shcharansky was just such an occasion. Days before the Soviets handed over Shcharansky, Bonn Bureau Chief William McWhirter set about covering the final days of delicate negotiations for Shcharansky's freedom. He dispatched Correspondent John Kohan, Russian fur hat and extra sweaters in hand, to Berlin to stake out the Glienicker Bridge. Says Kohan, who speaks both German and Russian: "The swap closed out a story of great individual courage and determination. Shcharansky took on the Soviet security apparatus and won."

Jerusalem Bureau Chief Roland Flamini, who covered Shcharansky's joyful arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, was struck by his subject's aplomb and good humor. "With his command of the situation," says Flamini, "it seemed clear that Shcharansky was going to remain a newsmaker." Associate Editor Patricia Blake, who has written dozens of stories on Soviet dissidents and their struggle for human rights, including cover stories on Nobel Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov and Shcharansky himself, was pressed into service. Blake flew from New York to Jerusalem, where she succeeded in gaining one of the first exclusive interviews with Shcharansky. "I placed the 1978 TIME cover story on his case in front of him," says Blake. "He was absolutely fascinated. Looking at a photo of Sakharov, he said sadly, 'There he is protesting my fate during my trial. Now I am free and he is in (internal) exile.' "

Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott reviewed the political forces that had converged to make possible Shcharansky's release. An expert in Soviet- American relations and former TIME diplomatic correspondent, Talbott had covered the story of Shcharansky's arrest and imprisonment in the 1970s and had recently talked with Shcharansky's crusading wife Avital in Geneva about her husband's plight. Moscow Reporter Nancy Traver was among those visiting with Ida Milgrom, Shcharansky's 77-year-old mother, and his brother Leonid, in a friend's apartment. Says Traver: "She was radiant, smiling and laughing, even though he had been whisked through the city and she had not had a chance to see him." Last week that jubilant frame of mind was shared by millions around the world.