There was a measure of trepidation in the air as the new year approached in Moscow. When the clock struck midnight, would the electricity go off? Would water emerge from the taps? Would the central heating, controlled from central power stations, continue to work as the mercury dropped and Y2K took hold?
Some people took no chances. Diplomats from many embassies hired suites in the plush Natsional (sic) Hotel, which had its own generator. Journalists anxiously phoned public utility organisations to monitor the latest developments. The Moscow waterworks spokesman was in good humour. "Don't panic. Don't fill your bath with water. The supply won't fail. Fill it with champagne and have a happy new year." At £1.20 for a bottle of shampanskoye, filling a bath with bubbly is a more realistic proposition than in Ireland.
As it turned out, all the Y2K worries were unfounded but something dramatic did happen. At noon on New Year's eve I caught the following words from my radio in the unmistakable tones of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin: "I'm leaving. I did all that I could. A new generation will replace me."
The new generation was Vladmir Vladimirovich Putin, a former KGB spy with little experience in wielding political power in democratic circumstances. His first move as acting president was to issue a decree granting Mr Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.
As family and friends gathered on the Bolshoi Kammeny bridge across from the Kremlin to usher in the new millennium that night, glasses were raised in the toast "Za Rodinu, Za Putina"(To the motherland, To Putin) - an ironic echo of the slogan used by Soviet soldiers as they went into battle in the second World War ("Za Rodinu, Za Stalina").
As acting president, Mr Putin was a certain winner in the election. But there were a few odd moments. Needing more that 50 per cent to win in the first round, he was running well below that figure in the early stages. Regions in the Far East were giving him 42/43 per cent. Then all results stopped for four hours. When they resumed, Mr Putin was getting around 52/53 per cent. Later the English language Moscow Times conducted an investigation which claimed massive pro-Putin fraud throughout Russia but particularly in southern regions such as Dagestan.
The OSCE, which monitored the elections disagreed, and so, not surprisingly, did Mr Putin.
The inauguration was a lavish affair of mock-Tsarist grandeur in the Kremlin and hot on its heels came an event that caused worldwide concern. I found myself, by accident, right in the middle of the action.
I was walking from the apartment I had rented on Malaya Bronnaya street to do some shopping on Pushkin Square when all hell broke loose.
Armed men in balaclavas burst out of vehicles and broke into a building on Palashevsky Lane. The building housed the headquarters of Media-Most, the only media group in Russia to oppose Mr Putin's election. I first thought the armed men to be criminals but, in the upturned world of Russia, it soon became clear that the guys dressed up as robbers were actually cops.
The owner of Media-Most, Mr Vladimir Gusinsky, was later arrested, detained in Moscow's dreaded Butyrka prison and then released with all charges dropped. He now lives in exile in Spain and the charges have been reactivated.
It was in early August, however, that Mr Putin faced his greatest challenge, as he presided over a series of disasters unprecedented since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Pushkin Square, to which I was travelling when I stumbled across the raid on the Media-Most headquarters, became, in August, a scene of carnage. An underpass that connects the city's original McDonald's restaurant, the offices of the Izvestia newspaper, the upscale shopping mall Galereya Aktyor and a group of three metro stations which cater for 120,00 passengers daily was subjected to a bomb attack.
Chechen rebels were blamed initially for the dozen or so deaths but later evidence indicated a razborka (a settlement) among criminal gangs.
In the space of a week came Russia's most dramatic episode of the year. First reports were vague. A Russian nuclear submarine was in distress in the Barents Sea. For two weeks a drama was played out in which Soviet attitudes came to the forefront. Mr Putin remained on holiday in Sochi for days as Russia became transfixed at the plight of 118 sailors.
What followed was watched daily throughout the world on television. Claims that the submarine Kursk was hit by a foreign submarine were denied. Distraught relatives of the lost submariners were shown on television and one young widow was seen to be injected publicly with a sedative. This, to Western eyes, called up images of the days when dissidents were sent to psychiatric hospitals. But to be fair, the scene was familiar to those who had attended funerals in Russia, where sedatives are available on demand.
The Kursk tragedy severely damaged Mr Putin's reputation abroad but not at home. Russians are not yet used to political leaders expressing public sympathy. The President's slowness to do so did not harm his image.
August ended with yet another bizarre indication of the parlous state of Russia's infrastructure. A fire destroyed Europe's tallest building, the Ostankino TV tower in Moscow, which was once a proud symbol of the Soviet Union. Russians, with their self-deprecating sense of humour, harked back to the official reports of the Kursk tragedy and mused that Ostankino must have been destroyed "in a collision with a foreign TV tower"
Down south, the war in Chechnya raged on and daily reports of the deaths of Russian soldiers crept from the front pages to the inside pages, and then from the tops of the right-hand pages to the bottom of the left-hand pages.
Yet my abiding memory is of a bleak apartment in the North-Western city of Pskov, where a young widow had set up an altar to her lost husband and the townspeople went to church to mourn 200 local men who had recently lost their lives. Pskov has a wall on which the names of the fallen are inscribed. Its list of names of those who have died in Chechnya is now longer than that for Afghanistan.