Michael Dobbs is a reporter for the i>Washington Post/i>, who devoted much of his journalistic career to covering the collapse of communism. He was the i>Post/i>'s bureau chief in Warsaw (1980-82), Paris (1983-86) and Moscow (1988-1993). He has held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton University and is the author of three books: i>Down with Big Brother /i>(1996), i>Madeleine Albright /i>(1999) and i>Saboteurs/i> (2004). i>Down with Big Brother/i> was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for non-fiction.