I WENT to visit a dissident last week. In Soviet times, we would have met on the cold street, looking over our shoulders for KGB agents in leather coats and trilby hats. However hard life is in post communist Russia, at least that fear has gone. I just picked up the phone and arranged to go over to her apartment for a cup of tea and a chat.
Natalia Sokolova lives in very poor circumstances. She is struggling to bring up four children on a meagre state allowance of 100,000 roubles ($20) per month, plus whatever her husband Edik can earn unloading vegetables at a street market. Her apartment behind the rubber boot factory in Moscow's Preobrazhensky district is a slum, the stairwell outside smelling of urine, the walls inside plastered with yellowing newspapers because she cannot afford wallpaper.
But Natalia herself, who opens the door to me dressed in a neat grey skirt and white blouse, radiates light. She is a person who has always had a strong purpose in life.
A biologist by training, she used to perform experiments on the brains of dogs in the same institute that preserved the brain of Lenin. That was her day job. By night she sat up typing out carbon copies of banned books by authors from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to George Orwell.
Distributing these texts constituted "anti Soviet agitation and propaganda", which was punishable by a long term in a labour camp.
You will not have heard of Ms Sokolova because, miraculously, she managed to avoid arrest. But the names of other dissidents in her circle, such as Larissa Bogoraz and Father Dmitrv Dudko, may ring a bell. They were quite famous "enemies of the people" at the height of their activity in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Settling down at her kitchen table, as Russians used to do in the old days, before they became too frantic earning a living to have long philosophical conversations, Natalia reminisced about her dissident days.
"My apartment was an underground publishing house. The telephone was bugged, of course. But the biggest danger to me was actually from my own family. Can you imagine it? My mother reported me to the authorities. She was a strict communist then and thought she was acting for my own good. We laugh about it now," Natalia said.
"After Mum knocked on me [the Russian expression for betrayal], the KGB came for me at 5 o'clock on a frosty January morning. But I wasn't in. I was talking to a friend on the street below. I saw the agents in the window of my apartment, lifting my pillows, going through my things. Then they left. They arrested someone else and didn't bother coming back for me. You see, like factories, the KGB also had their plans to fulfil. They had fulfilled the plan for January and so they didn't need to arrest me any more.
Although Natalia herself was not caught, she made several long train journeys to Siberia, taking food parcels to jailed friends. "They were hard times, of course," she said. "But life was full of meaning then. There was a clear struggle between good and evil. Things are not so black and white any more."
The conversation turns to the rule of President Yeltsin, which has given Russians more theoretical freedom but plunged the majority of the population into such dire poverty that they are hardly in a position to enjoy it.
"Of course, you cannot say we have a proper democracy now, she said. "The politicians are mostly ex communists and they are all corrupt. Probably the people have the leaders they deserve. You cannot achieve democracy by presidential decree. Citizens must learn to take personal responsibility."
Although Natalia says the secret police, now renamed the FSB, are still intact, she thinks it unlikely dictatorship will return to Russia in the forms it has taken in the past. But then she adds: "The present authorities have no need of labour camps. They control us by subtler means." What does she mean?
"I mean they keep us in a perpetual state of uncertainty, not paying our wages, for example. They do not quite let us die but neither do they let us live. People are obsessed with material problems, the rising price of sausage, where the next meal is from, so they remain Natalia, who at the end of the 1980s became active in the Russian Orthodox Church, tries to rise above the material. To her, that is what it means to be a dissident today. She teaches her children English and takes them out into the woods to paint watercolours.
"I feed them when I can but when they are hungry, I teach them that man does not live by bread alone."