On the morning of Monday, August 19th 1991, Moscow's citizens switched on their radios and televisions and instead of scheduled programmes heard Tchaikovsky's music for the ballet Swan Lake. Soon afterwards, the tanks began to roll into the centre of the Russian capital.
A state emergency committee, nominally headed by vice-president Gennady Yanayev, had been set up. President Mikhail Gorbachev, on holiday in the Crimean resort of Foros, had been relieved of his post "due to ill-health".
As the early events unfolded I, like many foreign correspondents, was at home on holiday. A phone call before 6.00 a.m. alerted me to the situation and, thanks to Aeroflot's frequent flights through Shannon, I was back in Moscow that afternoon, the first of the three days which ultimately, if perhaps accidentally, changed the world.
There were only six passengers on the Miami-Shannon-Moscow flight that morning: four Siberian businessmen returning from a visit to the sugar factory in Carlow, a Limerick quantity surveyor on contract to Aer Rianta, and myself. We boarded the big Ilyushin 62 and flew into the centre of a political whirlwind. Everyone else, Americans and Irish, had cancelled their bookings.
The crew's first act was to move us into first class. The Siberians, as is their wont, produced bottles of vodka, the stewardesses plied us with the best food they had and, facing a possible return to the Stalinist era, there was a distinct air of the condemned men frantically enjoying their last decent meal before heading to the Gulag.
My big worry was that we would be turned back at Sheremetyevo Airport, which I assumed would by now be surrounded by tanks. We landed and I steeled myself for either the usual one-hour ordeal of passport control and customs inspection or being frog-marched back on to the plane and sent home.
Neither happened. The airport was empty. The formalities took less than 10 minutes and there was no indication that anything unusual was happening until I reached the inner ring road, the Sadovoye Koltso, where police diverted traffic away from the city centre.
Further on, there were tanks stationed outside the foreign ministry press centre just before the Sadovoye Koltso crosses the Moscow River at the Krimsky Bridge. Things began to look serious.
But soon there were indications that this was a strange, disorganised coup. One tank I saw on my way to The Irish Times office had small boys clambering all over it. More significantly, the Metro was still working so anyone who wanted to get to the centre of Moscow could do so, despite the blockade at the inner ring road.
At the Manezh Square, rows of tanks had drawn up, their guns pointing across the Alexandrovsky Gardens at the Kremlin. A typical Russian babushka wagged her finger at a tank commander and instructed him not to shoot at his own people. He replied that he couldn't shoot at anyone because he had no ammunition.
The lads in the newly opened Shamrock Bar, just a stroll from the Russian White House where Boris Yeltsin had set up his headquarters in opposition to the coup, were visited by the police that night and politely told they should close the bar at 8.30 p.m.
Gradually, there were other signs that the coup was not all it was cracked up to be; but at this early stage, no one was taking any chances. One friend, Andrei Mironov, a dissident, had been released from the Gulag four years earlier. He felt under threat: "I gave my notebooks and address books to different westerners, in case I was rounded up," he told me in Moscow 10 years later.
By the second day, Tuesday, August 20th, it had become clearer that the coup would fail. The official newspapers came out with identical front pages containing decrees of the emergency committee, but those banned by the coup plotters began to take emergency measures. Nezavisimiaya Gazeta started to arrive by fax in The Irish Times office in a special edition.
I managed to establish contact with a person who worked in the Kremlin. The reply passed back to me by a third party was a devastating one: "They are not in control. Prime Minister Pavlov has drunk himself into a state of collapse. His bodyguards carried him out of his office complaining about how heavy he was." The English Guardian got word that acting president Yanayev had been drinking heavily too. Even Mironov, who had a lot to lose, was beginning to feel at ease. "On the second day," he told me recently, "I began to see that the threat was fading."
The BBC correspondent, John Simpson, spoke to former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze at the Russian White House and was told that Yeltsin was inside, in the control room, co-ordinating opposition throughout the country. Some time later, when Shevardnadze was president of Georgia, he told Simpson he had lied - Yeltsin was, he said, locked up in a room drunk.
At this stage, the crowd outside the White House had grown to about 40,000 - not a large number for a city like Moscow, which is bigger than London. This was not a demonstration of "people power" like those seen in Prague and Berlin.
But sections of the army which had been called out by the emergency committee began to go over to the Yeltsin side. The defectors included Gen Pavel Grachev, later the defence minister who involved Russia in the first Chechen war. Gen Alexander Lebed defected too and was later to be the negotiator who ended the first Chechen war. Less famous and less successful subsequently was a certain Maj Yevdokimov who brought a regiment of the elite Taman division over to the Yeltsin side - his career path went steadily downward thereafter.
Also prominent on the Yeltsin side were the vice-president of the Russian component of the USSR, Alexander Rutskoy, and the speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov. At the same White House little more than two years later, these men held out briefly under shellfire from pro-Yeltsin troops under Gen Grachev in a stand-off between presidential and parliamentary forces.
Late on that second night, there was a nasty turn of events when three young men were killed in an underpass where the Sadovoye Koltso intersects with the main road westwards from the city centre. The incident was caught on film by CNN and shown repeatedly. Although the footage was not seen in Moscow, it gave viewers outside Russia the impression that the country was on the verge of civil war. The opposite was the case.
These were the only fatalities and, in hindsight, it is obvious they were the victims of young conscripts who panicked when they felt they were under attack.
On the morning of the third day, I stuck my neck out. Interviewed on RT╔'s early morning news, I told newsreader Eamon Lawlor that the coup was all but over. The station's evening bulletins would, I said, be reporting that the emergency had ended.
I kept my fingers crossed and my judgment was confirmed in the early afternoon when the TASS teleprinter in the office spat out the news that a press conference would be held by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that afternoon to condemn the coup.
That conference was attended by young party members. None of the prominent Politburo people who had supported the putsch were present. On the way, with Peter Pringle of the London Independent, to the Oktyabrskaya Hotel where the young communists met to condemn their elder brethren, I saw the first truckloads of troops leaving the capital. They waved to us as they left. They looked even happier than we felt.
Then the news came through that Gorbachev would return from Foros a free man. His press conference the day after the coup fizzled out was a triumph, at least to those of us who managed to get seats at the foreign ministry press centre. The old Gorbachev, who bored reporters to tears with his long-winded circumlocutory replies to journalists' questions, had gone.
He spoke like a schoolboy who had been in an adventure. Locked away by his adversaries, he had heard the truth over the BBC World Service. He had, alluding to one of the most foul epithets in the Russian language, told his captors to "go where Russians tell people to go".
By now, when it was clear which side had won, vast crowds had gathered to demonstrate against the plotters and the party. One celebrated incident was the pulling down of the statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first Soviet secret policeman and Yakov Sverdlov, who had ordered the execution of Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg.
At the time, this was put down to the exuberance of a newly liberated people. It was learned later that the operation was carried out by members of the virulently xenophobic and anti-Semitic Pamyat organisation. Dzerzhinsky was a Pole and Sverdlov a Jew.
Events developed rapidly. Yeltsin publicly humiliated Gorbachev in parliament. Gorbachev later left the Communist Party. Foreign minister Alexander Bessmertnykh was fired. In December, Yeltsin, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarus prime minister Stanislav Shushkevich met at a hunting lodge near the Polish border.
They emerged to tell the world that the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Shushkevich admitted later that the main object of the exercise was to ensure Gorbachev lost power. Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union - if there was no Soviet Union, he was powerless. One of the major aims of the coup plotters had therefore been achieved, paradoxically, by their opponents.
The Yeltsin era that followed saw more Russians die on their own territory than at any time since Stalin. Communism was crushed but many Russians were worse off. A new class of super-rich emerged while the vast majority lived in abject poverty. Two Chechen wars were waged in succession and the second is still in progress.
President Yeltsin began to appear in public in a state of advanced intoxication and, in August 1998, Russia's economy collapsed. Spectacularly, in the dying moments of the 20th century, he announced his resignation and appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin as acting president. Putin, in the first act of his authority, decreed an amnesty against prosecution for Yeltsin and his family, at a time when allegations of serious corruption were emerging.
All the same, the international community convinced itself that the hardliners of August 1991 had been defeated and would never get their way. But would they?
A strange event, even by Russian political standards, took place just a few weeks ago in Moscow. The surviving coup plotters, having avoided severe sentences on charges of high treason, held a press conference to explain to the world they had been in the right all along.
Dmitri Yazov, the Soviet defence minister who called out the troops 10 years ago, described perestroika as "a plot against the people". According to Oleg Baklanov, once a member of the defence council of the USSR and leader of the military-industrial complex, the main heritage of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin presidencies was "wars in the former republics, refugees, children left to fend for themselves, tuberculosis, AIDS and prostitution". Oleg Shenin, secretary of the Politburo in 1991, said he was "proud to have remained faithful to the ideals of the Communist party and to have distanced myself from Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Shevardnadze".
Vasily Starodubtsev, former president of the Soviet peasants' union, and now governor of the Tula region, described Gorbachev as a "Judas within the Soviet Communist Party, a loudmouth and a cynic".
Former prime minister Pavlov struck a chord with his fellow plotters when he said that the current leadership under President Putin was making efforts to restore control over the country: "Today, they are trying to do what we attempted to do in the Soviet Union in 1991."
"President Putin has given signals that he is trying to defend Russia's positions at an international arena," was Baklanov's contribution.
One senior putschist was not present at the conference. Vladimir Kryuchkov, as head of the KGB in 1991, was President Putin's former boss and has seen many of his former underlings gain high positions in the Kremlin.
No reason was given for Kryuchkov's absence. There is strong evidence however that he shares the views of his former colleagues. In an interview with the weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, he described Putin as "an independent politician and the most constructive leader of recent years".