The work opens with Garton Ash in a coal mine in Poland in the spring of 1989. He attends a meeting for the labor union and social movement, Solidarity, as they prepare to participate in elections. Adam Michnik, a longtime dissident, historian, and Solidarity member is in attendance. Garton Ash is surprised to be invited to speak, and he assures all present that Solidarity and its leadership are well known in the West. He speaks in favor of the elections and Solidarity’s success. Such an action could potentially have led him to serious legal trouble, but by the end of the year the communist government, a “People’s Republic” no longer existed, as “the people had deleted the People” (8).

That same spring, Garton Ash attends political meetings in Hungary, where the reform efforts are led not by a labor union, but by various political parties, including the Communists. Viktor Orbán, now Hungary’s president, participated then as a member of the Alliance for Young Democrats. Garton Ash notes that such reform efforts were largely confined to Poland and Hungary—East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia progressed on distinct timetables. Poland and Hungary engaged in a series of elite negotiations for a transfer of power.