The gates opened to reveal a forbidden world. Up until that day, I had never had a real conversation with a Polish worker, meaning one that was not supervised by our minders from Interpress. I thought of workers as a kind of lumpen proletariet, made up of faceless, uninteresting people, spouting the opinions of the regime. Entering the Lenin shipyard, I felt as if I was wandering behind the scenes of an elaborate theater production. For years, Communist propagandists had forced Western journalists to watch the show from the balcony. We suspected that what we were seeing on the other side of the proscenium arch was false, but we could never be sure. The actors had become thoroughly accustomed to the lines written for them by the party ideologists. Yet here they were, rebelling against the director and rewriting the script. The make-believe world created by Communist propaganda was shattered for good.

Odd things stick in my mind from that first day at the shipyard: torn-up sheets of asbestos used by the workers to sit around on the grass; the red dressing gowns of hospital patients wandering around next to the shipyard gate; Lech Walesa's rasping voice as he demanded the establishment of niezalezny, samozandny, zwianzki zawadowi (plse correct spelling); the excited cries of "Amerika, Amerika" that rippled through the shipyard when theworkers found out that a reporter from The Washington Post had arrived. But mostly I remember the smiles on everybody's faces, the intense conversations, the irreverent jokes about the Communist regime. It was like visiting a monastery after the inmates have just been released from a lifetime vow of silence. In the process, I discovered that people I had previously dismissed as cyphers were interesting individuals with hopes, worries, and diverse points of view. I was reminded of John Reed's description of the Russian Revolution: "For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere." That is what it would be like in Poland for the next sixteen months.

My life as a reporter changed for ever that day at the Lenin shipyard. From being a largely sedentary pursuit, reporting on the Communist world suddenly became incredibly exciting. I spent the next decade following strikes, coups, wars, upheavals, and eventually-with the demise of the Soviet Union-the remaking of the map of Europe. When Boris Yeltsin jumped on the top of the tank in August 1991 to rally opposition to the hardline communist coup, I was standing right in front of him. For those of us who were fortunate to cover it, the collapse of Communism was one of the defining news stories of the twentieth century.