The past year has been anything but dull for Moscow's foreign community, with an attempted coup, elections and political battles shaking up the city on a regular basis. But for Judith Shapiro, it has been happy fate to be smack in the middle of every political quarrel in Moscow.


"It's been a bizarre year, to say the least," laughed Shapiro, as she gazed out from her apartment window towards the White House. "But what an incredible lesson in history. Where else in the world could you have such an opportunity to see history in the making?"


Shapiro, a native New Yorker working as an economics lecturer at London University, said she was thrilled when she was appointed as adviser on the Macroeconomic and Finance Unit at the Russian Finance Ministry, a team of about 20 Russian and Western economists and advisers led by Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Aslund.


"It almost seemed as if everything I had done in the past prepared me for this," she said. "I was lecturing in England on post-Soviet social policy -- a very specialized subject -- when I was invited last February to work here on social policy."


Shapiro's interest in social policy and social change is not just academic, a fact reflected in her persistent interest in everyday life. In 1982, during her first visit to Russia, she said she went into food shops constantly to check up on prices.


"Even now I pride myself on knowing the prices of vegetables in different shops and markets," she said. "This is actually quite meaningful if you're concerned about the minimum wage."


But as well-suited as she was to the job, the appointment itself was threatened by the tumultuous political twists and turns within Russia's parliament, and ultimately depended on the reformers' hold on power. "It was on-again, off-again throughout the winter of 1992-93, when Gaidar was removed and then reappointed," Shapiro said. "I didn't know until the last minute whether or not I was coming. But then I got the phone call, found a replacement lecturer, and there was no going back."


During the year, Shapiro drafted a social program proposal that included new types of aid for the poor, minimum pensions and wages, and child benefits that aimed to be more generous to those in urgent need, and planned to shift social spending to the regions.


The status of the proposal is as yet unknown. It has been presented to President Boris Yeltsin, Shapiro said, but no decision has been made.


Shapiro, a small, energetic 50-year-old with a doctorate in British labor problems from the London School of Economics, said she first became interested in Russia in 1981 due to a growing disillusionment with socialism.


"I used to be very left-wing, and only interested in Russia from that point of view," she explained. "But when it became clear that socialism wasn't working even in Russia, I had to find something else to focus on. So in 1982 I started learning Russian.


"It was a great course. Most of the teachers were emigres and Doris Lessing was in our class," she said. A tour to Leningrad and Moscow the following year cemented Shapiro's addiction to Russia.


Maintaining a constant connection with the country through yearly visits, she returned four years later for a stint giving lectures on labor economics at Kharkov University in Ukraine.


"It was a fascinating time -- it spanned the end of the old period and the beginning of the thaw. Chernenko had just died and Gorbachev had come to power," she recalled. "There was a real feeling then of imminent change."


But life for a foreigner in the mid-1980s in the Soviet Union was not as easy as it is in 1994 Moscow.


"Back then I lived in a hotel, and cooked out of a suitcase. It's amazing what you get used to," she said, smiling.


"After six months in Kharkov, we came up to Moscow. I remember being amazed to find a shop that sold cheese -- we simply couldn't buy cheese anywhere in Kharkov, which is incredible considering it was one of the larger cities in the Soviet Union."


Although Shapiro's work with the Macroeconomic and Finance Unit was suspended Jan. 27 after the resignation of Sachs and Aslund, the leaders of the team, she hopes to maintain close ties with Russia.


"I'll miss it so much when I leave," she sighed. "Many of my closest friends are Russian. Most of all I'll miss the warm companionship that one finds around the kitchen table -- I suppose it's compensation for the cold winter outside."