information:extraction, linguistic:paraphrasing, linguistic:voice_change, structural:reformatting
Symbolism

In the 2020s, Swan Lake became a symbol of protest in Russia. The symbolism dates to the failed Soviet coup of 1991. On August 19 of that year, as tanks rolled into Moscow, state television aired the entire ballet on loop. Communist hardliners then announced that they had seized control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, whom they had arrested. Boris Yeltsin responded by climbing on a tank in central Moscow and urging citizens to turn out in protest. For three days, thousands of protesters stood off the army, after which the coup leaders relented. Within four months, the Soviet Union was gone.

In 1991, there was a tradition of interrupting regular programming by airing the ballet on loop when the government was in crisis: it happened with the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, while a successor was selected, and again with the deaths of Yuri Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Swan Lake thus became "a sign of political instability and upheaval."

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, public opposition to the war was made illegal. Swan Lake became a coded symbol of protest against the war or the Putin regime. Graffiti of the "Dance of the Cygnets" appeared in Russian cities, and when the independent Russian news outlet TV Rain signed off for the last time, due to government pressure over its coverage of the war, it ended with a clip from Swan Lake. It has become "a sign that we are waiting for Putin to die." Putin has not established a successor, meaning that "there's always the risk that Tchaikovsky's swans may dance again."