While Bill Clinton and Bob Dole jockey for position in November's U.S. presidential election, another political contest is much closer at hand, and more significant. In a few weeks Gennadi Zyuganov and Boris Yeltsin will face off in the second presidential election ever held in Russia. The choice is so stark, and the result so important, that Time decided to cover the campaign as thoroughly as we would an American presidential race.

"I was impressed with how willing the people were to talk openly about the issues and the candidates," says Time's chief political correspondent Michael Kramer. For two weeks, Kramer and veteran Moscow reporter Yuri Zarakhovich followed Yeltsin around the country, while Washington correspondent James Carney, returning to his old posting in Russia, tracked Zyuganov. Back in Moscow, correspondent Sally Donnelly and stringer Constance Richards filed background reports; picture editor Mark Rykoff directed a team of 10 photographers; and Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, a longtime Soviet watcher, returned to a much changed Moscow to take the city's pulse. Coordinating the complex operation was Moscow bureau chief John Kohan, who drew on his eight years of experience in Russia. The result of the team effort is this week's special report on the precarious state of democracy in the former Soviet Union.

Hong Kong correspondent John Colmey considers Nepal one of his favorite travel destinations. Unlike his previous trips, though, his journey to Katmandu last week was not for pleasure. Within hours of receiving his marching orders to cover the tragedy on Mount Everest, Colmey flew from Kuala Lumpur, where he had been on assignment, to Bangkok. From there he called our Nepalese stringer and rattled off an 18-point list of things to do. Colmey arrived at the Katmandu airport at the same time as a friend of Japanese climber Yasuko Namba, who died in the storm, and thus got his first interview. By the time he reached Hotel Vajra, where he has stayed several times, his contacts there had arranged for him to meet everyone from Sherpas to ministry officials. His work did not go completely smoothly, however. "I could not send E-mail from Katmandu," Colmey reports. "But the climbers, with the aid of satellite phones, had no problem reaching the Internet from 8,000 m in -25[degrees]."