I NEVER know what I'm going to find in my letterbox in Moscow these days. In Soviet times, picking up the mail was a predictable experience - there would be a fresh copy of Pravda, and, if I was lucky, a letter from my Mum in Yorkshire which had taken six months to reach me through the KGB controlled postal service.
Last week I opened the box to find an electricity bill (a novelty as Russians are only just beginning to pay for utilities), some American junk mail advertising a machine to make your belly flatter and a pamphlet from the fascist party, Russian National Unity. This latter was to my mind the real junk mail.
"Russian people!" it said, "With their latest reforms, our enemies have embarked on the final stage of the destruction of Russia. Only Nationalists who put the interests of the country before all else can restore Russian order on Russian Earth."
The party, denying it was fascist, put forward policies which at first glance seemed reasonable. It promised full employment, protection for families and a dignified old age for the nation's pensioners.
Millions of Russians have been reduced to poverty in the course of President Boris Yeltsin's market reforms, and those promises would strike a chord with many who have seen their living standards drop, or worse still received no wages at all for many months.
But you did not have to read much further to realise what a dangerous ideology Russian National Unity was propagating. And in my book, a party which uses the swastika emblem and urges its supporters to wear black shirts "to demonstrate to the enemy the unity and determination of the people" is a fascist party, whether it accepts the label or not.
The authors ranted on at length about how the "little brothers", a term used in Soviet times to describe people from other republics, had become impudent, abusing the goodwill inherent in the Russian national character.
This seemed to be more or less an invitation to supporters to attack guest workers from republics such as Ukraine and Georgia, who have flooded into Moscow and other cities as their economies have declined even more sharply than the Russian economy since the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The pamphlet's main editorial spoke of how the Western world was growing desperate for raw materials, while overpopulated Asia was running out of territory and poor Russia in the middle would become a colony of both, nothing more than a pool of cheap labour, unless it acted to impose "Russian order" in the world.
"At the present time, the world is dominated by America, which bows down to money. But in its path stand the Russian people carriers of the best human qualities, placing the spiritual over the material," it said.
The party, led by Alexander Barkashov, an electrician and karate champion, who first made his name in Russia by fighting in the uprising against Boris Yeltsin in October 1993, claimed to have "tens of thousands of activists in cities all over Russia". It invited prospective members to come to a metro station on the edge of Moscow, where they would be shown the way to the venue for regular weekend rallies.
It is hard to know just how great the threat of fascism is in Russia today. Barkashov, who said he broke away from the old Russian nationalist organisation Pamyat (Memory) because it did nothing but "engage in empty talk and dressing up in uniforms", admitted there were too many "dwarf" movements which fought among themselves and prevented Russian nationalists from "uniting in a single fist".
In addition, fascism is a dirty word in Russia, where the older generation still remembers and the younger generation is not allowed to forget the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union.
But give it another name and on Shakespeare's principle, fascism could start to be as potent here as it was in Germany, Italy and Spain.
Liberals believe Russia cannot afford to be complacent. Young reformers have been given another chance to make the new market economy work more fairly but if they fail ...
"It seems to me that Russia is now frighteningly like Germany in the 1920s," said Vyacheslav Kevorkov, a KGB officer turned writer, who devoted most of his career to analysing German affairs. "Our people are humiliated, resentful, longing for strong leadership, looking for scapegoats."
I only hope he is wrong and I can toss my political junk mail in the bin along with the adverts for the belly flattener.