THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 22, 1996 TAG: 9606210021
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By Dave Addis
LENGTH: 82 lines
So the big surprise from the Russian election, on this side of the globe, was the emergence of a retired general as kingmaker when neither Boris Yeltsin nor his communist nemesis, Gennadiy Zyuganov, could pull more than 35 percent of the first-round vote.
Maj. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, recently retired, finished third with 15 percent, making him the man with all the marbles - for the moment. Whoever gets Lebed, so the reasoning goes, gets a leg up on the final face-off in July.
Both leading candidates wanted him. Zyuganov offered him a key post in a communist government. Lebed responded with a sneering rebuke.
Yeltsin immediately named Lebed his security chief and fired his loyalist defense minister, Pavel Grachev, because Lebed and Grachev, once colleagues, are now enemies. It was Grachev who forced Lebed out of the army. Then Yeltsin fired his closest friend and bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, a master of backstage political skullduggery.
Whew. The tsars and the commissars may be gone, but the Kremlin still churns up the very best brand of geopolitical intrigue. When the smoke of vengeance cleared, Lebed was the only man standing. It's been that way much of his career.
Just who is Alexander I. Lebed? The morning news described him as being ``catapulted into international prominence'' by his election success. But Lebed's ascendancy was no surprise to those who watch Russian politics closely. They've had an eye on him for years.
Lebed, who is 46 and was a general at the tender age of 38, is described as a strident nationalist, which he is - although one might keep in mind that when Norman Schwartzkopf says the same sort of things as Lebed, we call him a patriot.
In 1991, when a vodka-soaked gaggle of hard-liners tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, it was Lebed who led the defense of the White House. Yeltsin, at the time, described him as ``a man who will stand his ground.''
I met Lebed in Moldova in 1993, where the general and his razor-edged 14th Army had squelched an ugly little border war in one of the old Soviet Union's most remote and hideous backwaters. Tiraspol, the town where the 14th Army was headquartered, was still technically a war zone, but after a taste of Lebed's hit-'em-fast, hit-'em-hard style, peace was blooming everywhere.
``Nobody shoots here but me,'' Lebed said in the basso-grumble that is his trademark. ``I'm a soldier, not a diplomat. If anybody begins to fight, I'm going to teach them a lesson.''
Know this about Lebed: He is blunt, forceful, cocky to the edge of arrogance and very aware of his image. He was angry at the media the day we met him because a prominent Moscow newspaper had put his face on its front page, attached to a cartoon body of Rambo.
So the general greeted me and a military writer for one of Moscow's most-powerful newspapers skeptically, from a parade-rest position beside his desk. He was about 6-foot-2 and had the build and grip of a chestnut tree.
Most Russian generals won't be seen in public without their chestful of medals, but Lebed, who led airborne troops in the Afghan war, was dressed in fatigues, his trousers bloused into his jump boots, paratrooper-style. He was bush-ready, and it was not for show, as he didn't know we were coming.
But Rambo he is not. If forced to characterize Lebed in American terms, you might peg him as a mix of George Patton and Elliot Ness: a pragmatic, aggressive and flamboyant military man who despises sloth and corruption in all forms.
Lebed quit drinking two years ago - astonishing, really, for an adult Russian male - because he wanted to be ``the only person in the whole country who is sober on principle.''
I saw a similar flash of Lebed's principles during our interview. As we talked, the general reached for a pack of bad Bulgarian cigarettes. I offered him a Marlboro, which he waved off. Asked if he disliked American cigarettes, he said, no, they were excellent - ``But it's not good to get too used to such things.''
Lebed can be sparse with words, but they are packed with meaning. His choice of a tar-pot Bulgarian smoke over some fine Virginia burley was not anti-American, or anti-Western. In Lebed's mind, it simply is not a good idea to get hooked on something - even a Marlboro - if it's beyond your means; it makes you vulnerable to corruption.
And therein lies the genius of Yeltsin's maneuvering the general into his corner. Russians are at once enamored of strong leadership and sickened to death by the systemic corruption that is strangling their nation.
Lebed might turn out to be a powerful palliative to both those emotions - unless he finds, as did many who came before him, that the briar patch of Moscow politics is too thick for one honest man to hack through. MEMO: Dave Addis is a Virginian-Pilot staff writer. by CNB