Swan Lake

On the morning of 19 August 1991, Soviet television cleared its schedule and put on Swan Lake. The tanks were in Moscow, the coup against Gorbachev was under way, and for three days the same swans looped between short official bulletins until the plot collapsed on the 21st. A generation came out of it able to read Tchaikovsky as a weather report on the state of the country.

Uzhhorod has cast that broadcast in bronze. On the railing where the road bridge leaves the Kyivska embankment stands a small television set with the ballet stopped mid-scene on its screen — the city's 30th miniature, put up in October 2017 and dedicated to World Television Day.

A ballet with a second job

Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake in 1875–76 and it opened at the Bolshoi in March 1877, on its way to becoming the most recognisable ballet in the world. In the Soviet Union it picked up a second function as programming of last resort: it filled the airwaves during official mourning, above all when a general secretary died, and then across the August putsch. The association outlived the state that created it.

That is what makes the object sharper than it looks. A wood-cased television playing the loveliest thing on Soviet TV is a monument to the years when beauty on the screen meant something had gone wrong off it.

The Synevir claim

Zakarpattia tells it differently. Local accounts have Tchaikovsky — whose family line ran back to a Cossack in what is now central Ukraine — conceiving the ballet while resting in the Carpathians, on the shore of Lake Synevir. Nothing documents it, and his biographers place the writing squarely in Russia in 1875–76. The story survives anyway, partly because it plants a world-famous score on a Zakarpattian lake, and partly because swans on a small dark screen look entirely plausible in mountain water.

Why this railing

The siting is the best line in the whole piece: the bronze television hangs within sight of Zakarpattia's main transmission mast, a receiver parked underneath its own transmitter. Locals read the bridge behind it as a seam between periods — the interwar Czechoslovak town on one bank, the Soviet one on the other — which suits a monument to an interrupted broadcast.

Kolodko unveiled it alongside Rostyslava Dzhumurat, a television presenter and Honoured Journalist of Ukraine, which was the right guest list for the occasion. It was number 30 in a series he began in 2010 and which now runs to several dozen around the city.

Finding it

Kyivska embankment, at the start of the transport bridge over the Uzh near the Hotel Uzhhorod — 48.6222, 22.2869. It is small and dark against dark metal, so slow down at the rail.

Of all the Uzhhorod miniatures this is the one that gives up least to the eye. Ten seconds of looking and it is a toy TV set. Know what was on that screen in August 1991 and it is something else.