The most stubborn woman I ever met was the late Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov; having survived every Russian autocrat from Stalin to Putin, she treated them all with a kind of debonair disdain. Natan Sharansky was another stumbling block for the Kremlin. He told me he had endured years of solitary confinement, knowing that Andropov might execute him at any time on trumped up espionage charges, thanks to two things: the game of chess, which he played in his head, and the tiny copy of the Psalms, which he knew by heart and still keeps with him everywhere. What was the truth that revealed the precariousness of lies? It was the faith that moves mountains, whether it be the Jewish faith of Sharansky in Russia, or the Lutheran faith of Pastor László Tőkés in Romania, or the Catholic faith of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko in Poland. I remember the mood in Warsaw shortly after Father Popiełuszko's murder. It was one of simmering indignation, a thirst for justice and a quiet resolution that this brave young priest should not have been martyred in vain.

I remember, too, the mood in Prague in November 1989: not revenge for the violence of the police, nor even for 40 years of despotism, but pride in the history of pre-war Czechoslovak democracy — the first in Central Europe — and a firm attachment to the rule of law. The city where the Thirty Years' War began, where genocide, ethnic cleansing and show trials had taken place within living memory would now show the world how the people could make a peaceful revolution, a revolution without a Terror — a Velvet Revolution. In Prague, as in Warsaw and Budapest, the precariousness of lies manifested itself in the unexpected collapse of the most elaborate systems of control ever devised by men: the secret police, the propaganda machine, the party itself. The fear that had sustained the system had abated, though not disappeared; some members of the old order survived in power, whether by changing party names (the Hungarian Socialists, for instance) or by claiming to be a "transitional" guarantor of stability (General Jaruzelski remained Polish president despite his role in martial law). In Romania the Ceaușescus were executed after a putsch by other party apparatchiks, who bought themselves a few more years of power for which Romanians are still paying a price.

Despite the corruption, division and decay that Communism left in its wake, however, the more important story was the success of the new democracies. Those nations that clung to the past, such as breakaway Slovakia, took longer to find freedom, but only in the Balkans was there a real reversion to barbarism. History is not always the story of liberty, and sometimes truth is inextricable from tragedy.

And so to Berlin. I found myself in the epicentre of the earthquake on November 9, 1989, almost by accident. But being in the right place at the right time is never just serendipity: looking back on it I realise that my whole life had been leading up to this moment. The triumph of truth over lies in the events of that night became manifest in the fact that the fate of the Berlin Wall was decided by the failure of the party to communicate with the people. Günter Schabowski, the Politburo member for East Berlin, invited the foreign media to what was then an unprecedented display of glasnost: a press conference broadcast live on television. What happened in the last few minutes of that conference unfolded like a drama — but no human hand could have scripted it.