A Day in the Life . . . of the Soviet Union

At 7:30 a.m. the sun is barely clearing the hills above the Pacific port of Vladivostok, less than 40 miles from China. At the same moment, on the Bering Strait across from Alaska, the easternmost edge of the Soviet world is well on the way to an Arctic noon. And in Moscow, ten time zones to the west over an endless expanse of tundra, forests and inland seas, it is half past midnight, and yesterday has just ended. Not for eight hours will the commuters to the left head for their jobs in the capital from suburban Zagorsk. In the Soviet Union, more than anywhere else on earth, a day is here and there and now and later all at once.

The photographs on these and the following pages are the fruit of an extraordinary feat of organization. In the past eight years, Rick Smolan and David Cohen have co-directed projects that captured a single day in the lives of Australia, Canada, Japan and America. Now, after three years of complex negotiations with a government long used to rendering its territory invisible, they dispatched 100 top photographers from West and East to record a single 24-hour period. The result is A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, culled from 127,000 images snapped on Friday, May 15, 1987. The book, sponsored by Kodak, Nikon, Pan Am and Sony, is due next month from Collins Publishers ($39.95). In this Special Section, Time presents a 28-page selection.

What sort of day was May 15? In Moscow it began with an overcast sky that brightened briefly before being darkened by thunderclouds. In the Arctic Ocean, the nuclear-powered icebreaker Sibir was cruising toward the scientific station North Pole 27. In Central Asia scientists secretly tested the 170 million-h.p. Energia booster rocket, the world's most powerful. Through the day, photographers scoured areas once strictly off limits. Some places remained out-of-bounds: military academies were accessible; most military installations were not.

It is the miracle of the mundane, however, that illuminates A Day in the Life: children at play, cadets in training, workers in factories -- not icons of temporal power but modest vessels bearing witness to the profundity of the commonplace. It is this revelation of the familiar that humanizes our vision of the Soviet giant.

If the impression conveyed by these images is occasionally a touch too sunny, the Essay that follows offers different kinds of lights. Where the photographers froze a day on film, Time Senior Writer Roger Rosenblatt roamed the Soviet Union for a month. He provides a portrait of a nation reaching for midday while its heart remains in shadow.