Thirty-five years ago this morning, Muscovites woke to Swan Lake on every television channel — the old Soviet signal that something had happened which no one was yet ready to explain. A self-appointed State Committee on the State of Emergency had placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his dacha in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow. By lunchtime Boris Yeltsin had climbed onto one of them outside the Russian parliament to read a statement calling it what it was. The coup lasted three days. The country it was trying to save lasted four more months.

I have always remembered the ballet. Not the tanks; the ballet.