A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Winston Churchill called Russia "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." This week's cover story looks inside the wrapping. We have assembled an exclusive 28-page portrait of "A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union," excerpted from a forthcoming book by Rick Smolan and David Cohen, which is surely one of the most thorough attempts to capture the soul of that cryptic country.

Over the years TIME has made special efforts to bring you the world's best coverage of the other superpower, from the cover story on 1939 Man of the Year Joseph Stalin to last July's cover on the domestic and foreign policy reforms of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Our list of firsts is, as the Soviets would say, heroic. In 1970 Time Inc. published exclusive excerpts from the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, edited and translated by Strobe Talbott, who is now this magazine's Washington bureau chief. In 1979 TIME published a rare private interview with then Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev. In August 1985 Gorbachev chose TIME as the medium for his first major exercise in international glasnost, granting the magazine a two-hour interview.

Nor has TIME neglected the voices of Moscow's critics. In February 1985 we published excerpts from the memoirs of Soviet Defector Arkady Shevchenko, former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. Late last year we carried selections from Elena Bonner's account of life with her husband Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov during their exile in Gorky.

Not since 1980, when TIME devoted a special issue to the Soviet Union, has the magazine attempted such a wide-ranging look at Soviet life as in this week's cover package. Says Picture Editor Arnold Drapkin, who spent four weeks in Moscow serving as director of photography for the book project: "These are extraordinary photos of ordinary events." Assistant Art Director Arthur Hochstein designed the special section, while Staff Writer Howard Chua-Eoan provided the captions. Senior Writer Roger Rosenblatt, who contributed the accompanying ten-page essay, spent a month in the Soviet Union on the project. Contrasting his assignment with that of the photographers, he notes, "They did a day in the life. I tried to do the life." The result is a unique portrait of that giant, paradoxical, intensely human land.