As the world commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the focus is rightly on the horrors of the regime it ushered in.

Russians, and their captive nations, suffered a century of almost inconceivable pain. Tens of millions perished in the revolution and civil war, in the forced collectivisation of farming, the terror of the 1930s, and the second world war. Then came the postwar repressions, and finally the tumult of the end of communism and the bewildering attempts to introduce capitalism and democracy. Russians should be forgiven for being traumatised by their recent history.

The intelligentsia’s response was 'internal emigration': free thinking actually stimulated by the lack of freedom

I lived in the Soviet Union for two years in the 1970s, at the height of the cold war, under the dead hand of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule. It was a state that isolated itself from the world, in which the Communist party attempted to exercise total ideological control. It believed that central state planners could organise the economy more efficiently than the market. In fact, the planned economy turned out to be barely controlled chaos, further muddled by everyday corruption and sheer bloody-mindedness. If a shop assistant was more interested in painting her nails than in serving you, there was little you could do about it.

Yet somehow the memory I retain most strongly is not of oppression and empty shops, but of a society that thrived on something that was missing in our hectic western lives – a sense of togetherness and sharing, by which Russians contrived to beat the system. Sugar and hope were equally scarce commodities, and friends shared them generously. What looked at first sight like a downtrodden nation was in fact a people practising passive, sullen, unspoken resistance to evil, helping each other to survive the idiocies imposed upon them by the system.

If I were to design a monument to the Soviet Union it would be a kitchen table. Around it would be seated a group of friends, cigarettes and vodka glasses in hand, a loaf of bread and some pickled gherkins on the table. One friend stares wistfully out of the window. On a shelf, a tape recorder plays songs by the wonderful singer poets Okudzhava or Vysotsky, pouring out the pain that had no other outlet, on scratchy cassettes dubbed and redubbed and passed from hand to hand. On a stool lies a pile of “thick journals”, Russia’s literary magazines, which once in a while would include some gem of subversion or satire.

The intelligentsia’s response to totalitarianism was “internal emigration”. In this world free thinking was actually stimulated by the lack of official freedom. Shortwave radio broadcasts provided the single lifeline to the world outside the cocoon in which the Communist party attempted to wrap its citizens. Western stations such as the Voice of America, the BBC and Radio Liberty were known collectively as “voices”. I remember sometimes hearing their call-signs at night, ringing out in the darkness from a nearby apartment, and you knew that there were people around who thirsted for the truth. Without the invention of radio, the Soviet authorities could have kept their citizens in complete darkness.

Two of my best friends were prominent scientists. I asked them once what they had been doing in 1968, the year Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, and students staged revolts across western Europe. They had been on an expedition, camping in khaki tents in the Tian Shan mountains, singing quietly rebellious songs around a camp fire, their backs firmly turned against the anti-western hysteria coming out of the Kremlin. Later they took refuge in the “scientists’ city” of Novosibirsk, where thought control was less stringent. They even held folk festivals there for banned singers.

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For the intelligentsia, “Soviet” life – with its propaganda and party indoctrination sessions – went on beyond an imaginary fence. They observed it from a distance, like a dance of demons round a fire, while they created for themselves a better world of integrity and honesty, far from the century’s horrors.

The working classes had their own way of shunning the state, summed up in the words: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.” And people of every class found joy in the small, simple pleasures of life – in friendship, sharing, laughter, walks in the forest. In the pervasive atmosphere of fear and suspicion the only people you could really trust were your closest family and friends.

The kitchen table conversations were a little warm pool of light in the totalitarian darkness. Today it’s different. My Russian friends say those meaningful (drunken) conversations about life have given way to the mundane preoccupations of western societies – jobs, money, holidays, gadgets.

No one would wish back the darkness. But it’s a shame that mellow light had to go out too.

• Angus Roxburgh is the author of Moscow Calling: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent