There were those who chose a direct confrontation with the regime, or decided to leave for Israel - the only permitted destination of emigration, accessible only to Jews - thus overnight becoming "untouchables", but these were just a handful. This was the time of heated night-time discussions in the kitchen - away from the phones, or phones with jammed dials, or covered with pillows. I shall never know whether these naïve security measures were of any use. This was the time of psychiatric hospitals and, in exceptional cases, expulsions to the West for some of the most famous opponents. It was the time of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, of Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Vysotsky. Desperate last dark hours before dawn - without the comfort of knowledge that the dawn would ever arrive. And the growing feeling that there were more and more of us, those who shared the scorn and despair, at all levels, across the board, even in the KGB itself, and who wanted a "normal" country, not what we had.

The dawn turned out to be grey, messy and slow, but dawn it was. In the first years of perestroika the whole country was glued to the TV screens and immersed in newspapers - not a common pastime in the 1970s or early 1980s. The late 1980s to mid-1990s was the era of brilliant journalism. I still do not understand where all this talent came from after the interminable hibernation of the Soviet era. It was this new journalism that dealt one blow after another at the old myths of every kind - and at the fear, ours and their own. Every publication was a statement: look, I am saying what I am saying, and nothing is happening to me, so you too can say whatever you want to. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the fear was gone, dead.

All former barriers to information and all former bans on particular views were gone. What the 1970s generation of the intelligentsia did not dare to dream of was all on sale two decades later. Economically, the 1990s were terrible, but they brought about hitherto unimaginable freedoms. There was so much freedom that the man in the street felt almost choked by it, particularly when it started to be used and abused to further narrow political and economic agendas and to settle personal scores. And if the taboo on freedom was gone, so were many other taboos, too. When, in 1998, the Duma's pro-reform liberal deputy Galina Starovoitova was assassinated, one of her colleagues said: "We have frozen in silence, in anticipation of the return to the half-whispered conversations in the kitchen."