I awoke slowly on 19th August 1991. I was in no hurry to get out of bed, since the train was not due to reach Moscow until mid afternoon. To delay the inevitable, I reached for my radio, put in an earphone, and lay back on the pillow to listen to BBC Newshour.

I knew immediately that something was seriously wrong.

For months, the calm and familiar voices of Newshour presenters Robin Lustig and Owen Bennett-Jones have accompanied me round the planet. But the stream of excited words that reached my sleepy brain that morning made my eyes grow wider and wider, and I suddenly sat up bolt upright, involuntarily muttering an oath from my normally clean mouth, to the surprise of my fellow travellers.

What I was hearing was potentially very serious and I had to let other people know what I knew. I jumped out of my bunk, quickly got dressed, unplugging the earphone so the people in my compartment could hear what I was hearing.

I then headed along the train informing people that the country we were travelling through, and the planet in general, wasn’t quite the same one as it was last night. People were skeptical and asked how I knew – when I explained that I have a shortwave radio and heard it from the BBC World Service, their expressions changed.

As I headed back to my carriage and compartment I could hear people spreading the word, and within a few minutes people started congregating in the corridor of my carriage. It was just coming up to the hour, I took my radio out into the corridor, turned the volume to the maximum, so as many people as possible could hear.

“This… is London.” crackled a solemn voice from my radio. There was a sudden hushed silence up and down the train corridor. Lillibullero blared cheerfully out to a sea of worried faces in the train corridor.

Each sentence from the newsreader caused a sharp intake of breath from my fellow passengers:

“President Mikhail Gorbachev has been overthrown…” “A group of hard line communists have taken control of the Kremlin, and are issuing decrees to consolidate power…”. “State of emergency…”. “The Red Army has been mobilized”. “Tanks are patrolling the streets of Moscow…“.

After the main points of the news had been read out and digested by those within earshot, the conversations started up and down the train. What would this mean? What would we find in Moscow in a few hours?

For everyone, the news took a while to actually sink in. It was profoundly concerning and depressing. All of us had grown up during the Cold War, with all major world events affected in some way by the ever-present threat of planet-annihilating nuclear conflict, between the opposing ideologies of capitalism and communism, as they uncompromisingly faced off across the iron curtain.

Recently, of course, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the ice has finally been beginning to melt. With the fall of the Berlin Wall 2 years ago, Eastern Europe is becoming free, and the Soviet Union has appeared to be leaving behind the failed system of totalitarian Marxism-Leninism.

But now? Suddenly the world looks to be heading back in the opposite direction – back to the Cold War – at least that was the conclusion we all came to as we sped towards Moscow. Glasnost and Perestroika had perhaps just been a naïve dream…

The Russians on the train who spoke English couldn’t believe that the hard liners were suddenly back running the Kremlin. One of them had a radio, and tuned in to the local English transmission from Radio Moscow. This confirmed it for them, with the declaration of a state of national emergency to start later in the afternoon.

Depressing and scary though all this was, there wasn’t really too much any of us could do about it – nobody thought it was a good idea to get off the train before reaching Moscow. We played a final game of multi-lingual Scrabble, and consumed some of the remaining goodies for lunch, but the drinking water supply on the train was running out.

At 3pm the Trans Siberian Express came to a gentle stop in Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station, and the long long journey was over. Everything looked normal in the station. It felt weird to climb off the train with all my travel buddies after 7,621 km (4,735 miles), knowing that we were about to all say goodbye and go our separate ways. And into a city which was suddenly very much the focus of world attention…

My instructions were to head for number 15 Petrovka Street, and the Intourist Travel Office where I could arrange my onward travel to Poland. To get there required use of Moscow’s rather elegant metro system and this (as my very detailed information had warned me) required 5 Kopec coins – which I had taken the precaution of obtaining on the Trans-Siberian!

My plan was to continue westwards the following night – in theory I had enough time to stay 2 nights in Moscow, the transit visa being valid until 22nd August. However the sudden instability caused by the coup makes me think I should try to get out while I still can…

Accordingly, after some queueing I reached the desk, and was able to buy a ticket to Warsaw for the following night.

In the travel office, I met Serge, one of the Russians from the train. I said I was going to try to find a place to stay, and he said he had friend who let out rooms in his apartment. Two other backpackers (Gill from UK, and a German with a guitar) joined me and we all went to Gorkogo (Gorky) Street, which last year actually reverted to its prerevolutionary name of Tverskaya.

On the way we saw what look like a demonstration in the street… this was unexpected, what with the military moving to control the city, and the state of emergency having been declared by the coup leaders specifically to ban demonstrations.

After a bite to eat in a McDonalds, we all went up to the apartment of Serge’s friend. It was desperately small, but the family was welcoming and the 3 of us ended up with enough space to sleep. Finally I could tune in to the BBC and find out what has been going on:

The news wasn’t good, and certainly didn’t make Moscow feel any safer, but I found it oddly reassuring to hear the familiar voice of the BBC’s Moscow bureau chief, knowing that she was in the same city. I kept listening, and soon Bridget Kendall dispatched a dramatic update to her earlier report, which was at the same time both encouraging and potentially terrifying:

I lay thinking about what I’d just heard, and if it could really be the case that elements of the Red Army were mutinying, and how this might affect events the next day. I also thought about the fact that in the morning I would – if I dared – be perfectly able to go and find out for myself…