A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

TIME's coverage of dissidents in the Soviet Union goes back nearly 60 years to a 1927 story that reported on Leon Trotsky. Though "excommunicated from the party," TIME wrote of the man who was later assassinated in Mexico on Joseph Stalin's orders, Trotsky "is the leader of the opposition and is uncompromisingly outspoken in his criticism." Since then, and particularly over the past two decades, TIME has reported at great length on the activities of other Soviet citizens who have publicly protested the Kremlin's brutal rule. This week we return again to the subject with a lengthy excerpt from a soon-to-bepublished memoir by Elena Bonner, who lives in exile in the closed city of Gorky with her husband, Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel-prizewinning physicist and spiritual leader of the Soviet dissident movement. Bonner's son-in-law electrified the Frankfurt Book Fair last week with the news that despite repeated Soviet efforts to destroy Sakharov's own memoirs, they have been preserved, are now in the West, and will eventually also be published.

This week's project was directed, as were TIME's previous excerpts from books by Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig, Theodore H. White and Soviet Defector Arkady Shevchenko, by Executive Editor Ronald Kriss. "Before we choose a book to excerpt," says Kriss, "we always ask: Does it enlarge our knowledge of history; does it give us new insight into the way our world works?" Bonner's book combines both deeply personal and broadly historical elements. Says Kriss: "It is a story of two people living in terrible isolation, but also waging a heroic fight against a vast and monolithic state system. The title has it right: Bonner and Sakharov are Alone Together."

Senior Writer Otto Friedrich mined some 7,500 words from the book's 272 pages to produce the compelling story that appears in this week's issue. For Reporter-Researcher Sally Donnelly, the task of verifying the story was made even more challenging by the fact that the author could not be reached. Donnelly, who majored in Soviet studies at the London School of Economics, was struck by the relentlessness and brutality of the KGB. "But in their own way," she notes, "Bonner and Sakharov are every bit as relentless in fighting the system." Friedrich agrees: "It is a story of a fearless woman of indomitable character. It could be a story of a woman against the sea, against Mount Everest -- it has that adventure quality. We always think that the KGB cannot be resisted, but she resisted. You can almost see some wretched Soviet policeman wishing she would just go away."