That day, while Gorbachev and Yeltsin bargained for ministerial positions at the Kremlin, real power in the country and the capital rested with Gennadii Burbulis, a forty-six-year-old grandson of Latvian immigrants who had grown up in Yeltsin’s native Sverdlovsk. A former university professor of Marxist political economy and, since the beginning of perestroika, a democratic organizer and an anticommunist to boot, Burbulis had recently been appointed by Yeltsin to the post of secretary of state, the second-highest office in the Russian hierarchy. This gave him control over the presidential
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