Gennady Burbulis: Eyewitness to the Soviet Collapse

Early on the morning of Monday, Aug. 19, 1991, phones were ringing across Moscow. At 4 a.m., members of the so-called “Gang of Eight,” hard-liners from the upper echelons of the Soviet government, had ordered KGB border troops to surround the Crimean summer home of the country’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. They sent more troops into Moscow, trying to seize power and roll back Gorbachev’s liberal reforms, which they deemed ruinous for the USSR.

Another target for the plotters was Boris Yeltsin, newly elected as president of Russia, the Soviet Union’s biggest republic. He urgently assembled his men at a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow to mount an opposition. Among his loyal supporters was 46-year-old Gennady Burbulis, who would go on to be Yeltsin’s right-hand man and a central political figure in post-Soviet Russia.   

Within days, the coup failed. Iconic images include Yeltsin atop a tank in front of Moscow’s House of Soviets, a.k.a. the White House. The events of that week would usher the Soviet Union into the short and chaotic final stage of its existence—officially ending in December 1991 with the signing of the Belovezha Accords1 and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Now, 35 years after that fateful morning, the Davis Center library offers researchers at Harvard and beyond a new resource: more than 10 hours of oral history interviews with Burbulis, fully digitized and available online. The donation comes from Richard A. Conn, Jr., who conducted the interviews in the spring of 2021, a little over a year before Burbulis’s death. 

Conn moved to Moscow in April 1992 to help open the second international office of Latham & Watkins, a law firm that advised major Russian corporate clients and financial institutions, helping implement the privatization reforms that Burbulis championed. Conn’s decades-long personal and professional relationship with Burbulis developed through his work with the U.S. Committee to Assist Russian Reform, an early-1990s advisory initiative that worked with the Yeltsin administration to help post-Soviet Russia transition to a free-market economy.

In the interviews, Burbulis discusses the events leading to the August 1991 coup attempt and its aftermath, the relationship between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, his own role in drafting and signing the Belovezha Accords, the establishment of the CIS, the formation of the post-Soviet Russian government and its relations with NATO and European states, and the 1993 constitutional crisis, including attacks on the Russian White House and the Ostankino Television Center.

Of particular interest are Burbulis's personal recollections and assessments of the events and personalities that shaped Russia's so-called wild ‘90s. He discusses Yeltsin's apparently photographic memory, punctuality, and absolute intolerance of profanity—something he regarded as unusual in Russian politics. The interviews also include a first-person account of Yeltsin's address from the White House balcony after the failed August 1991 coup attempt, with thousands gathered below chanting in unison, "Rossiia! Svoboda! Yeltsin!" ("Russia! Freedom! Yeltsin!").

The constitutional crisis of 1993 is covered in similar detail, including Burbulis's recollection of driving through a completely deserted Moscow on the way to the Kremlin. Trained as a philosopher, Burbulis also reflects on the politics of memory, Russo-European relations, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The interviews are available in Russian with English subtitles and accompanied by transcripts in both languages. They form a valuable addition to the Davis Center library’s collection of unique archival materials, both analog and digital. Acquisition and stewardship of materials like the Burbulis interview archive is one of the many ways in which the library, established with the founding of the Russian Research Center in 1948, continues to support teaching, research, and scholarship at what is now the Davis Center.

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  So named after the Bialowieza Forest, in what is now Belarus, where the signing took place.