Bakiyev's greatest mistake was that he forgot how politics worked in his own country. He spat on the delicate coalition that had swept him to power. Kyrgyzstan is a clan society where regional and family ties drive economic and political life. Last summer the Kyrgyz analyst Mars Sariyev warned: "By placing all power in the hands of his clan from Jalal-Abad, he is angering the other clans that might rise against him." As we talked he insisted we move tables twice. Is that man in sunglasses an informer? More than 50 per cent of the Kyrgyz economy is estimated to be black or illicit. The country sits smack bang on the heroin road to Europe north from Afghanistan. There are those who argued that it was only with the grace and favour of gangsters that Bakiyev managed to grease the wheels of the Tulip Revolution. When he let his son Maxim monopolise the shadow world, the aspiring despot turned the powerful, armed Kyrgyz gangs against him. 

The final nail in his political coffin was the arrogant assumption that he could play the US off against Putin's Russia as they scrambled for bases in these strategic crossroads. Bakiyev launched a bidding war between the great powers, letting the US open a base to Moscow's ire, before closing it in exchange for vast sums of Russian money, only to reopen it when Washington stumped up even more greenbacks. The Kremlin felt he had stolen from them. The White House decided it couldn't rely on him to be "our son of a bitch". 

Bakiyev then hit the people where it hurts, raising utility bills by 400 per cent. Simmering disgruntlement at creeping authoritarianism began to boil. 

A week before blood splattered the streets of Bishkek, my jeep entered the country from Tajikistan via a mountain-pass border post. Faint from altitude sickness, I asked a guard for his views as we watched his guard dog chase its own tail in the snow. His reply was curt: "The president's a prick."

Hours later in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, I dined with a family of eight. Our meal was stale bread and recycled tea. His face haggard from mountain truck-driving, a father of three small children despaired at the country they would grow up in. He ate only the smallest morsel of bread, leaving the rest for his toddlers. "There are no jobs here. Nothing. When the Russians were here we had schools, hospitals and factories. Nobody gets jobs here unless they are Bakiyev's family." 

Sharing a taxi to Bishkek I heard the same complaints. "Look at this road. Nobody has repaired it since Gorbachev."

But the soft jazz was still droning in the luxury bars of Bakiyev's capital. Smartly-suited profiteers turned what they had milked from the system into dizzyingly expensive cocktails. If you mentioned the disgruntlement in the countryside, or that in the villages donkeys were the most common form of transport, not to mention the fact that for most people living standards had been declining relentlessly since the mid-Eighties, you were abruptly brushed away. "Kyrgyzstan had the highest growth rate in the ex-USSR last year," smiled one hotelier. This tatty parade failed to see it coming. Not one diplomat or analyst predicted the anarchic insurrection. 

If on 6 April you had suggested to the staff at the Da Vinci lounge bar, haunted by slippery investers and money-launderers, that the following day they would be raiding the stocks and sheltering from rifle fire outside, or that the day after that the bar would be razed to the ground, they would have laughed at you.