By CHRISTOPHER REDMAN /EDITOR, TIME ATLANTIC

n this week's issue, Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge writes about Iranian intelligence operations in Central Asia, a region that could prove to be a post-cold war powderkeg. It is a story that exemplifies the surrealist quality of the former Soviet Union today--something Quinn-Judge has been experiencing in everyday life. Recently he tried to drive to the center of Moscow, only to find police cars, lights flashing dramatically, blocking the main roads and causing a huge traffic jam. In the far distance he could see people marching along carrying red banners. What looked like an impromptu communist demonstration, though, turned out to be Moscow's minuscule Irish population, along with a lot of well-lubricated Russian friends, celebrating St. Patrick's Day. "The red banners," says Quinn-Judge, "were Coca-Cola signs."

No wonder he keeps coming back. After university studies in Russian history and after spending some time in the country, the British-born Quinn-Judge spent 15 years as a correspondent in Southeast Asia--watching a succession of regimes fall in places like Vietnam and the Philippines--before his knowledge of Russia and the Russian language drew him back to Moscow in 1986 as bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe. The country that he remembered as "deathly news-free" had become rife with political upheaval, wars and uprisings. Breaking news took him to places like Nagorno-Karabakh (where Azeri militiamen denounced him as a Russian spy and wanted to hang him), Georgia and Lithuania. His six-year tour was rounded out by the decline of Mikhail Gorbachev and rise of Boris Yeltsin in August 1991, and by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Quinn-Judge was then dispatched to Washington, which turned out to be a base from which he traveled to cover conflicts and dodge bullets as far away from the politics of the U.S. capital as Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti. Then, in 1996, he joined TIME for yet another tour of duty in Moscow, where he found that the more things change, the more they stay the same. "The place was run by a secretive elite under the Soviets," he says, "and the place is run by a secretive elite now." Luckily, Quinn-Judge will be on hand to continue unraveling the country's quirks for us.