HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- General Alexander Lebed
Russian general who applied military toughness to politics Ian Traynor General Alexander Lebed, who has
died aged 52 in a helicopter crash, was a gruff soldier whose popularity and
political ambitions raised fears of Bonapartism taking hold in the chaos of
post- communist Russia in the mid-1990s. He made his name as a Kremlin fixer,
negotiating an end to the Russian-ethnic Romanian conflict in Moldova in 1992
and, more importantly, saving Boris Yeltsin in summer 1996, when the first war
in Chechnya jeopardised the sick president's re-election bid.
By then, Lebed had developed political ambitions of his own, and ran against
Yeltsin and the communist challenger Gennadiy Zyuganov, taking 15% of the vote
in the first round of the 1996 presidential contest. He was then co-opted by the
murky figures running Yeltsin's Kremlin, threw his weight behind the president
and became head of the national security council. He had been stripped of his
military rank in 1995 in a bitter row with the hardline defence minister Pavel
Grachev, whom he now promptly had sacked.
Lebed had a shrewd and flexible mind, which proved extremely useful to
Yeltsin. The president needed a way out of the disastrous Chechen campaign after
the separatists had routed the Russians and captured Grozny, the Chechen
capital, in August 1996 - just as Yeltsin was being inaugurated for his second
term.
Lebed mitigated Moscow's humiliation, and negotiated a settlement that added
a dash of honour to the Russian withdrawal, an achievement which subsequently
gained him no plaudits among the KGB veterans and military men now running
Russia. "We have to read our own history," Lebed declared. "In 100 years, the
Russians could not defeat the Chechens. Diplomacy won. That's how we have to act
now."
But, after 1996, his face did not fit among the cast of rogues and villains
who dominated Yeltsin's last years in power. And as soon as he took office in
1999, Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, launched the second Chechen war to
undo Lebed's peace.
Democracy or liberty were never Lebed's guiding lights. "I'm not a liberal,
I'm a general," he would brag. His claimed focus was fighting corruption, acting
tough, and imposing the rule of law through no-nonsense author-itarianism.
Uncomfortable among Moscow's sleek movers and shakers, he decamped to
Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, to build a new power base. In 1998, he became governor
of this huge territory, a post he held until his death.
For 25 years, Lebed was a Red army officer. He served with distinction in
Afghanistan, and put his Moscow-based paratroop regiment behind Yeltsin in the
crucial days of August 1991, when communist reactionaries and the KGB mounted
their disastrous coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev.
He was born into crushing poverty in the southern Russian town of
Novocherkassk, historically a Cossack stronghold of militarists and rebels. He
was reared in a converted stable by his carpenter father, who spent five years
in Stalin's penal battalions for being late for work.
As a youngster in 1962, Lebed witnessed soldiers and tanks firing on
demonstrators who rose up in the Novo- cherkassk food riots and demanded the
overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev. At least 23 civilians, including children, were
shot dead in one of the few eruptions of civil disobedience in communist Russia.
The corpses were spirited away, and news of the uprising suppressed until the
era of Gorbachev's glasnost.
Lebed worked in factories and warehouses in the Novocherkassk area after
leaving school, while dreaming of becoming an air force pilot. He was rejected
by the air force and, at the age of 18, enlisted for paratrooper training in
Ryazan.
After long years of boredom and restlessness there, he left the Soviet Union
for the first time - at the age of 31 - to land at Bagram air base outside
Kabul, now the main base for British and American troops. He was in Afghanistan
for a year, a captain commanding a battalion, before moving to the Frunze
military academy in Moscow for three years, and being promoted to colonel,
commanding the elite 106th guards airborne division.
Lebed's military career embraced the key flashpoints of late 20th-century
Russia. The experience turned him into a trenchant critic of the top brass, and
pushed him further into an increasingly political career. His abrasive talents
were unlikely ever to propel him to the top of a democratic Russia, while his
stubborn, rebellious streak made him a liability as a team-player.
He leaves his wife Inna, and two sons and a daughter.
�Alexander Ivanovich Lebed, soldier and politician, born April 20
1950; died April 28 2002
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