A Letter From the Publisher: Mar. 18, 1985

During his nearly four years as TIME's Moscow bureau chief, Erik Amfitheatrof has reported in depth on the KGB, the changing life-styles of Soviet youth, Soviet military strength and scores of other stories. But no subject has preoccupied him more deeply than the waning lives and deaths of the Soviet Union's superannuated rulers. Since November 1982, Amfitheatrof has attended the obsequies for three top Soviet leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, as well as those for the powerful Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov.

To Amfitheatrof, each ritual had its memorable moments. "Brezhnev's was the first of my Red Square state funerals, but I missed it," he says. "I chose instead to be one of 30 journalists permitted to go into the Kremlin's pearl white, czarist-era Hall of St. George to watch the world's leaders express condolences to Brezhnev's successor, Andropov." Amfitheatrof had armed himself with a strong pair of Soviet-made binoculars to monitor Andropov's expression as he greeted such disparate visitors as George Bush and Fidel Castro. "The binoculars were large and conspicuous," recalls Amfitheatrof, "and as I watched the face of Andropov, the man who had led the KGB for 15 years, I felt the occasional chill of having my rude stare returned."

At Andropov's death 15 months later, Amfitheatrof once again maintained a vigil in St. George's Hall, "watching Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher applying body English during an earnest conversation with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and noting the poignantly graceful passage of sari- clad Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi." Amfitheatrof was covering Mikhail Gorbachev's successful visit to Britain last December when Ustinov's death caused Gorbachev to rush back to Moscow. Amfitheatrof also hurried back, canceling plans to join his wife and two daughters for Christmas in Rome.

For last week's funeral, Amfitheatrof decided to take up a post in Red Square. Reporter Nancy Traver, herself a veteran of two Red Square state funerals in her 1 1/2 years with TIME, checked the new Politburo lineup during the televised funeral and interviewed Muscovites for their reactions to the change of leadership. Under a gray sky shimmering with tiny, faint snowflakes, and armed once again with his binoculars, Amfitheatrof watched Gorbachev, now the Soviet leader, atop the Lenin Mausoleum. "He looked somber but strikingly youthful and tough," says Amfitheatrof. But reporting on Gorbachev's accomplishments, life and health will not be Amfitheatrof's concern. He is leaving the Soviet Union for a new TIME assignment in Rome.