From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN EVERY HICCUP FROM MOSCOW made headlines around the world. With the end of the cold war, newspapers and television have shifted | their attention to other areas -- from a riveting U.S. election to the tragedies in Yugoslavia and Somalia. Yet the tumultuous transformation of the former Soviet Union remains one of the biggest stories of the decade, and that's why we've devoted the entire main section of this week's issue to a special report on the New Russia. "The former Soviet Union's fate is still critically important to America and the rest of the world," says senior editor Johanna McGeary, who oversaw the project. "The threat this time comes from instability rather than communism."

In preparing the special report, McGeary called on a variety of talents at the magazine, including those of our nine-person Moscow staff. Correspondent James Carney, a native Virginian and Russian studies major at Yale, focused on two of his specialties: the nascent Baltic nations and Russia's hard-line conservatives. Reporter Ann Simmons, a British subject with a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, spent time with a working-class family to profile its desperate struggle to afford life's necessities.

Bringing special insight to TIME's coverage was correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich, a native Muscovite and translator of more than 20 books. "The best way to satisfy your curiosity about your own country is to cover it for a foreign magazine," says Zarakhovich. "When you just live among things, you often take them for granted; but when you have to spell them out for outsiders, you've got to stop and think hard to make them clear to yourself first."

Pictures also help tell the story, thanks to Moscow photo editor Glenn Mack, an Arkansas native and expert on Russian language, literature and telephone etiquette. "You are fortunate if you have a clear line long enough to have an actual conversation," he says. Bureau chief John Kohan, who returned to New York City last week to help editors close the issue, probed the Russian mind in an essay reflecting his four years in Moscow. "Just because they have McDonald's and Barbie dolls, we shouldn't expect they'll think and act like Americans," he says. That is precisely why we hope you'll find our report a fascinating window into a complex, evolving society.