Inside a Moscow courthouse last week, Anatoli Shcharansky stood trial with his life at stake. Outside, along with a group of dissidents, a small corps of foreign journalists waited grimly for the verdict, nodding at the familiar KGB agents who were photographing them in open surveillance. Among the correspondents was TIME's Marsh Clark, who filed extensively for this week's cover story, written by Staff Writer Patricia Blake.

For Clark, the trials were a culmination of his three-year assignment as TIME's Moscow bureau chief. In his 16 years with the magazine, he has covered scenes of combat in Viet Nam, the Middle East, Northern Ireland and Bangladesh. But Moscow is different. Here the struggle between the dissidents and the authorities is subtle and complex, with many diverse protesters:

a brave few fighting for human rights, others seeking to emigrate, some striving for religious freedom, and also ethnic groups trying to regain their homelands.

Early in his Moscow stay, Clark came to know the Soviet dissidents whose names would gain world attention: Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoli Shcharansky. It was Shcharansky who acted as Clark's interlocutor and interpreter in several talks with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Andrei Sakharov. Recalls Clark: "Shcharansky seemed merely to be busying himself while awaiting emigration to Israel, for which he had repeatedly applied, perhaps believing that by making himself obnoxious to the authorities they would kick him out. How wrong he was."

Since then, the dissident issue has been only one of many stories that Clark has covered. But it is now at center stage-especially because foreign correspondents, as well as their subjects, have been harassed. One has been questioned extensively by the KGB; two have been charged in a libel suit. Some have been labeled CIA agents; others have been reported "expelled" after leaving the country on routine transfers. At last week's trial, however, Clark observed that nearly all of the 22 American journalists now at work in Moscow were outside the courtroom. Says he: "As long as American correspondents are here, lawsuits, surveillance and other forms of harassment are not going to change their coverage of what they see as a part of the Soviet scene."

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