They would meet in secret, terrified of a KGB knock on the door. They laboriously typed out banned publications. Many ended up in prisons, labor camps and exile.

They were the Soviet dissidents, the human faces of the Cold War, waging nonviolent resistance against a cruel and cynical system.

Today, 20 years after Eastern Europe shook off its communist chains and the death knell sounded for the Soviet Union, Sergei Kovalyov might have expected to be feted for his role in breaking the chains of communism.

Yet the man regarded by some as the patriarch of the dissident movement is almost forgotten at home. He is unyielding in his critique of the new Russia and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a time when Putin is popular and criticism can be viewed as disloyalty.

Wistfully fingering the red lapel ribbon that signifies his membership in the French Legion of Honor, Kovalyov, 79, feels honored abroad but marginalized by the very society that he and his fellow dissidents struggled to set free.

In a country that claims to be democratic and open to differing views, he is not seen on major television networks, which are state controlled. Many Russians view Putin as the man who restored their country to greatness, and Kovalyov knows that few are likely to mourn his passing.

Kovalyov says even liberal media, which reach a relatively tiny audience, seem reluctant to air his views. Today, it is not the KGB that he and other critics of the government fear, but the unknown assassins who have shot, beaten or poisoned several of them.

Kovalyov is as tough on Russia today as he was on the Soviet Union. He speaks of a "bandit society" and urges the West to join his struggle. His critics call this lifelong Muscovite a "Russophobe."

In 2005, then-President Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Two years later, writing in the New York Review of Books, Kovalyov called Putin "the most sinister figure in contemporary Russian history."

He knows that he can say such things without fear of arrest -- that is one of the many things that have changed in the new Russia. But he also knows how controversial he is. He says he recently offered to resign as chairman of Memorial, the human rights organization.

"I understand that such an organization should be more careful than I am used to being," he said. As he spoke of how the group refused to let him go, their loyalty made his eyes mist over.

"Individual rights and freedoms are what's most important to him in life," said Edward Kline, a friend and president of the New York-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation. "But it's not necessarily the most important thing to everyone else, and that's a disappointment for him."

In Kovalyov's view, the West doesn't realize that hiding behind a democratic facade is an authoritarian country that violates free speech and manipulates elections. "Your countries are so accustomed to the fact that the law is something to be abided by that you can't understand a bandit society," he said in an interview, earnestly sitting forward in his chair in a Moscow office, his gaze penetrating through owlish glasses.

After years of diplomatic tensions, both Russia and the West seem determined to rebuild relations. The West wants Russia's help in curbing nuclear weapons and fighting the war in Afghanistan, while Russia's troubled financial system needs Western capital.

But Kovalyov argued that the West should be ratcheting up the pressure, even if it means a new Cold War. "You fear the Cold War, but you won it!" he said. "And now you allow this dragon to grow new heads. I absolutely don't understand why you are doing this."

Kovalyov acknowledged that Russia has changed, but he pointed to the dangers faced by critics of the Kremlin.

The antagonisms grew especially sharp after the apartment bombings in 1999 that killed about 300 people.

The government blamed Chechen terrorists, but Kovalyov helped form an independent panel of liberal legislators who suspected that government agents had set off the bombs to drum up public support for its second war in Chechnya.

One member of the so-called "Terror 99" commission was shot to death in a Moscow street in April 2003. Another died of a mysterious illness four months later; friends and family suspected that he was poisoned. A third was beaten unconscious in his elevator. An investigator working for the commission was arrested, convicted of divulging state secrets and imprisoned.

Kovalyov said he regularly receives anonymous threats against his life.

The crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006, and no one has been convicted in connection with her death. In Kovalyov's view, she was murdered because her enemies could no longer lock her up in the gulag. "It was impossible to shut her up," he said. "It was impossible to try her and sentence her; that would have been a scandal. It was impossible to bribe her. So she was killed."

Yulia Latynina, 42, an author and commentator for the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, came of age in the post-Soviet era and believes that Kovalyov's view, coming from a simpler moral universe, is too black and white.

"The dissidents were fighting against a totalitarian regime that is gone, and for all the deficits of Putin's regime we cannot say it is totalitarian," she said. "Now it's a quite complicated time. And maybe that's a reason the dissidents are still losing ground."

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, 81, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the oldest Russian human rights organization, worked with Kovalyov in the early 1970s, typing copies of the Chronicle of Current Events, a prominent dissident journal that Kovalyov -- "Sereyosha" to his friends -- helped to edit.

She says he is as uncompromising with Russian authorities as he was with Soviet officials. "If Sereyosha thinks a person is violating the law, violating human rights, acting contrary to democratic principles, he will say: 'You so-and-so!' And he will attack him."

She, on the other hand, seeks dialogue with the establishment and chairs President Dmitry Medvedev's Council for the Promotion of Civil Society, which is meant to encourage the growth of Russia's small community of civic and social volunteer organizations. "I don't accuse, I explain. I say: 'You don't agree? We will speak some more.'"

But, she said, Kovalyov still plays a vital role among Russia's rights activists. And, despite his abrasive manner, she agrees with his argument that Russia still has a generation to go before the wounds of the 74-year communist era are healed. "I absolutely agree with his assessment," she said. "I won't live to see Russia become a democratic state, with the rule of law."

Born when Josef Stalin was the Soviet dictator, Kovalyov grew up in Moscow and studied biology at Moscow State University. He had his first brush with authority in the 1960s, when he was fired as a researcher for campaigning on behalf of political prisoners. In 1969, he helped found the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights, one of the Soviet Union's few independent rights organization. Several members were quickly arrested, Kline said.

Kovalyov bitterly recalled that the United Nations failed to respond to the group's appeal for support but admits that the group was naive. "We were building," he said. "We were teaching. We were smart people, but we didn't know what the world was like. It was somewhere beyond the Iron Curtain."

As he stayed one step ahead of the KGB, he struck up a lifelong friendship with the physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident. Arrested in 1974 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," Kovalyov was convicted in a closed trial. Sakharov, meanwhile, was barred from traveling to Oslo to accept the Nobel Prize, so he read his acceptance speech outside the courthouse where Kovalyov was tried and called his friend "a boundlessly honest and heroic man."

Kovalyov spent seven years in a notorious political prison, the Perm-36 camp, near the wooded border of Siberia, including 10 days in a punishment cell for drinking tea in the wrong part of the camp. Three more years of internal exile followed. His son Ivan, who had taken over editing the Chronicle of Current Events, was also imprisoned, as was Ivan's wife, Tatyana Osipova. Kovalyov was freed in 1984 and allowed to return to Moscow in 1986. His son and daughter-in-law also were freed.

In 1994, as a deputy in the State Duma, he clashed with fellow deputies over the military force used to crush separatists in Chechnya. He watched cannons and planes pulverize Grozny. "I saw with my own eyes what was going on in that miserable place," he said.

Another former dissident, Andrei Mironov, recalled Kovalyov, then 64, living in the basement of Communist Party headquarters in Grozny, trying to negotiate cease-fires, jumping from foxhole to foxhole dodging gunfire and barely surviving a federal tank shell that flipped his van.

Kovalyov's denunciation of the war provoked outrage in the Duma, which stripped him of his post as the legislature's human rights commissioner.

Sergei Markov, a Duma deputy with close ties to the Kremlin, said Kovalyov was biased toward the Chechens and was regarded as focusing on the human rights of Russia's minorities while ignoring violations suffered by Russians living in the Baltic countries, Ukraine and Georgia. In Chechnya, "he tremendously undermined his authority on human rights" because he ignored rights violations by Chechen separatist leaders, Markov said. Today, he said, anyone who says anything good about Kovalyov risks being branded a Russia-hater.

Despite his controversial views, Kovalyov was re-elected to the Duma in 1995 and 1999. But he was defeated along with most other Kremlin critics in the 2003 elections. He retired on a monthly pension of $600 and today lives with his wife, biologist Lyudmila Boitseva, in his Moscow apartment. His one regret, he said, is that his determination to stay in Russia has separated him from his children and grandchildren, who now live in the United States.

The government structure that Putin built during two terms as president shows few signs of cracking under Medvedev. But Kovalyov draws a "very vague, distant optimism" from Karl Marx's image of the "old mole" of history, silently tunneling, relentlessly undermining the status quo.

"The mole is digging," he said. "But his work isn't visible on the surface."