A Letter From the Publisher: Jul. 27, 1987

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Most of us start our workdays with a familiar routine: sipping coffee, logging on the computer or perhaps watering a plant. TIME's Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott and Nation Editor Walter Isaacson talk to each other on the telephone. One such conversation several months ago strayed beyond the standard morning fare of news topics. Discussing Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy initiatives, Talbott and Isaacson were suddenly struck by a tantalizing question: What effect will all this have on the cold war? Associate Editor Thomas Sancton, meanwhile, was grappling with another puzzle, this one posed by Gorbachev's dramatic domestic reforms: Was the face of Communism changing in the U.S.S.R.? TIME's attempt to answer those two questions resulted in this week's cover stories assessing the first 28 months of the Gorbachev era.

In pursuing the project, Isaacson and Talbott journeyed to the U.S.S.R. for ten days of interviews with Soviet officials and other citizens. It was Isaacson's first visit. "The people we met were as fascinated by the topic as we were," says Isaacson, co-author of a recent book on the beginnings of the cold war, The Wise Men (Simon & Schuster; $22.95). "Before we could pose our questions, they were asking us, 'Can Gorbachev succeed? What do you think will happen?' "

For Talbott, it was the 13th trip. A student of Russian since prep school days, he has served as TIME's diplomatic correspondent and has written four books on relations between the two superpowers. Early on, Talbott spotted Gorbachev as a political comer -- a little too early, it turned out. "When Yuri Andropov died in February of '84," he recalls, "we had an office pool on the succession, and I put a dollar on the dark horse, Gorbachev. I lost. It wasn't until Konstantin Chernenko's death 13 months later that he got the top job."

Sancton, a former Paris-based correspondent, had watched Gorbachev in action during the Soviet leader's October 1985 visit to the French capital. "I was impressed by his immense self-assurance and his eagerness to field the thorniest questions," he recalls. "I thought at the time that this was a very different kind of leader." At the very least, we think readers will agree, the Soviet leader's actions have borne out that observation.