A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

There were no news conferences, no gleaming press centers, no ever helpful government spokesmen when James O. Jackson began reporting from Moscow for United Press International in 1969. "We spent a great deal of time covering dissidents," recalls Jackson, TIME's Moscow bureau chief since 1985, "partly because no one else would talk to us." In that grim, pre-glasnost era, scraps of information could be hard to obtain.

Times change, even in the Soviet Union. Jackson wrote this week's lead story in the World section on the special Communist Party conference that begins June 28. At that meeting, liberal reforms undreamed of in Jackson's early Soviet years will be debated openly. Journalists from around the world have begun to descend on Moscow for the event, their work aided by the proliferation of news conferences, press centers and ever helpful spokesmen. Jackson, however, will not be there to enjoy them. Instead, he will be in West Germany taking up his new duties as TIME's Bonn bureau chief.

Looking back, Jackson observes that the sheer mass of information that now flows freely to reporters under Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies can, in a sense, make reporting from Moscow even harder. "There is an availability of sources unheard of in the past," Jackson says, "and a past that had not been heard of before. Now we do current events and history all at once."

Jackson began studying Russian in 1958 as a sophomore at Northwestern University after Sputnik went up. He put the language to good use a decade later as a wire-service reporter in Prague, where he interviewed "bewildered and uncommunicative Soviet soldiers" who helped crush the reformist Prague Spring. That encounter gave Jackson a glimpse of the plight of individuals in a police state, which became a major theme of his 1986 novel, Dzerzhinsky Square. As he left Moscow for Bonn, Jackson looked forward to reporting from "a country that works, a land of good wine and clean rest rooms and no wars." His successor, John Kohan, knows that world as well as the gritty reality of Soviet life. A Bonn bureau correspondent since 1985, Kohan reported from Moscow in 1980 and studied briefly at the University of Leningrad in the 1970s -- experience that should give him a good perspective on how much times have actually changed in the Soviet Union.