Barry Kalb, TIME'S Eastern Europe correspondent since December 1978, has been to Poland six times, visiting nearly every region and major city of the country. As long ago as last winter, he reported that the troubled Polish economy was deteriorating sharply, bringing strangling inflation and a plummeting standard of living. "Despite the painfully obvious problems, the Communist Party seemed to be doing nothing of substance to improve the situation," he recalls. "Intellectuals and dissidents were warning that the people's patience was about at an end." Last week Kalb was back in Poland, talking with shipyard workers in Gdansk, coal miners in Silesia, government ministers and party officials, as the Polish regime struggled to cope with the two-month-old workers' revolt.

One major frustration for a journalist covering a foreign country for a long period of time, Kalb notes, is that he amasses much more information about the people, politics and institutions than can ever make its way into print. But, he says, "a story like the Polish crisis, which demands an analysis of an entire society, utilizes everything and everyone you know. It is a reporter's dream."

Kalb started his career as a journalist with the Washington Star, covering the anti-Viet Nam protests of the late 1960s. He finds the parallels--and the contrasts--with the Polish situation intriguing. Describing the high emotion and palpable patriotism of the strike settlement signing in Gdansk, he says: "To grasp its improbability, try to imagine Attorney General John Mitchell and Antiwar Organizer Jerry Rubin after the November 1969 march on Washington standing together and singing the Star-Spangled Banner."

Kalb also served in Hong Kong with CBS News. He toured China with President Richard Nixon in 1976 and has found Poland to be refreshingly different.

"Nowhere else in the Communist world, with the exception of Yugoslavia, does a Western correspondent have such broad access to the people and institutions that make a society tick," he says. "And nowhere in the Communist world do people speak their minds more freely. That's what makes Poland unique in the Soviet bloc--it is so open and its people so vibrant. That's also what allowed the incredible feat of workers' facing down a Communist regime to take place here."

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