As a student at the medical institute, Nina met Gennady Shalyopa. The pair married in 1969, and within a few years had two sons. Life in the 1970's, under Brezhnev's "period of stagnation", was for the most part uneventful.

"There were no long lines in the 1970's, no terrible shortages." says Nina. "Not in Moscow and Leningrad, anyway. Other parts of Russia had more difficulties as far as getting food products, but things here were fine. We lived modestly, but well."

The "thaw" of the Khrushchev years notwithstanding, Russians in the 1970's were still careful not to say the wrong things to the wrong people. "We didn't tell anecdotes on the trams, where someone might hear," says Nina. "Things weren't nearly so paranoid as in the Stalin years, but all the same, people weren't free to say whatever they wanted.

"Once I went to my uncle's house to visit," she continues. "He had a friend over, and we all sat around drinking wine. I told a political joke -- nothing terrible, just poking a little fun. My uncle laughed, but his friend looked at me and said very seriously, 'That's not funny. They put people in jail for jokes like that. And rightly so.'"

The 70's were a time when Soviets passed mimeographed copies of banned writings hand to hand, and fuzzy recordings of Western music were taped and re-taped. Vladimir Vysotsky rocketed to fame, and underground art flourished. "Of course I read banned literature whenever I could," says Nina. "But I wouldn't say it was something I was obsessed with. There was a lot of good literature that could be had legally."

In 1979, Nina was offered a position as the head of a city medical department, and as such was invited to join the Communist Party. She declined. "Part of the reason I turned them down," she says, "is because I didn't want the job. In those days, it was impossible to take a job like that without joining the Party... Who knows what I would have done if I had really wanted the job? Even I don't know.

"The idea of communism itself is not bad," she says. "But the fulfillment of it in this country was very, very bad. Once I realized that, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I remained very apolitical."