When Leonid Brezhnev died last week, TIME's staff went to work with the unaccustomed help of months of planning.
The cover painting of the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, had been engraved and sent to more than a dozen TIME printing plants in September. But the preparation could provide no more than a framework into which the week's news and analysis would be set. One extraordinary example: an exclusive TIME interview last Friday with a KGB defector, now in British hands, who tells how Brezhnev overruled KGB advice about Afghanistan, and how a bloody...
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