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 coup followed.

TIME, of course, has long tracked Brezhnev's career; he has appeared on 15 covers. His first private interview with U.S. journalists was granted to a TIME team led by Editor in Chief Henry Grunwald and Managing Editor Ray Cave in 1979.

In a sense, the current cover project started in 1978 when Associate Editor Patricia Blake, a Soviet specialist, wrote the first of her several versions of the Brezhnev obituary.

Last spring, at the direction of Assistant Managing Editor Ronald Kriss, hundreds of pages of reporting on Brezhnev and the succession began to arrive from correspondents, notably Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof, Washington Correspondent Bruce Nelan, who had just returned from Moscow, and Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who had translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs.

When Brezhnev's death was announced, the well-rehearsed plan for the special section went into operation. Senior Writer Roger Rosenblatt refined the introduction; Blake put final touches on the obituary and on an Andropov profile, then turned to the main news story; Staff Writer John Kohan, who once studied at the University of Leningrad, completed the story on the men Yuri Andropov must work with. In all, the 23-page finished product involved seven writers, 33 correspondents, eight reporter-researchers, much of TIME's layout and picture staff, and five editors. But despite all the precautions, nobody was fully prepared for the week's events. Sums up Kohan: "Even after so much planning, Brezhnev's death was strangely sudden."

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