Before becoming an author, Michael Dobbs was a journalist and foreign correspondent. After working as a Reuters correspondent in Rome and traveling through Africa, he lived in Yugoslavia during the final years of Tito’s rule. He later moved to Poland for The Washington Post, becoming the first Western reporter to visit the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk during the August 1980 strikes. As the Post’s Moscow bureau chief, he witnessed Boris Yeltsin climb onto a tank during the failed 1991 coup. He also covered martial law in Poland, the Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe, Gorbachev-Reagan summits, the Tiananmen uprising in China, and Romania’s 1989 revolution. Other highlights of his career included exposing Soviet atomic spy Theodore Hall, uncovering Madeleine Albright’s family links to the Holocaust, and covering the Bosnia peace negotiations for The Washington Post. In 2007, he launched The Post's Fact Checker column.
In addition to his work as a journalist and a historian, he has taught courses at Princeton, the University of Michigan, Georgetown, and American University. He also spent seven years at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he organized conferences on the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. He is the author of The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between (2019).
