The General Is Dead

Thursday, May 2, 2002
General Aleksandr Lebed, a former presidential challenger to Boris Yeltsin and the man credited with ending the first Chechen war, died in a helicopter crash. Preliminary reports suggest that the helicopter hit an electric pylon as it was trying to land at a Siberian ski resort. Lebed, 52, was found alive at the scene of the crash, but died en route to the hospital. In total, seven of the 19 people on board died in the on Apr. 28 accident, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry in Moscow. The remaining 12 are in critical condition. Federal crash inspectors have been sent to the site.

Lebed was the governor of Krasnoyarsk and a popular figure in Russia famous for his straight-talking political style. There have been suggestions that enemies of the general might be behind the accident. Alexei Arbatov, a member of the Duma, told ORT television that "malicious intent" may have played a role, and that "Lebed had long been at the epicenter of a battle between various groups and interests in Krasnoyarsk, among them economic, administrative, criminal, and political."

Lebed was the son of a factory worker who was sentenced to 12 years in the Soviet Union's notorious "gulag" prison camps for twice turning up only minutes late to work. At the age of 12, Lebed witnessed the crushing of a strike in his hometown of Novocherkassk, in southern Russia. At least 23 people were killed (no definitive figure has ever been agreed on). He claimed he was nearly a victim, as well.

After joining the army, he would later say that "we must call into the army people who have war in their blood," and he appears himself to have identified with the Cossacks of his home region. A dedicated Communist and passionate army man, Lebed fought with Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and graduated with distinction from an élite military academy. He was eventually made commander of the Tula paratroop division.

His division helped in the bloody suppression of protests in Baku and in Tbilisi. He was not, though, a blindly obedient soldier. In the 1991 coup, he refused to fire on protestors. In his own version, he told his senior officer, General Pavel Grachev: "Comrade Commander, you know that I am ready to carry out any order, but I must understand its meaning." Judging by his own spin, he was as disciplined with himself as he was with others. Hazing was not something he tolerated, and he was a teetotaler. He had, he said, "decided, as a matter of principle, to be the only sober person in our country."

He was courted by politicians but began his political career by brokering an end to a separatist conflict in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova. When Yeltsin attacked parliament in 1993 and when Russia's politics were in turmoil, he remained on the sidelines.

Then, in 1995, when his sharp criticisms of the defense minister left him without a command, Lebed moved to the national stage. He cut an imposing figure, with his hulking physique, deep voice, slow speech, and gruff manner. Soon Lebed had used his status as a general and his reputation as a hard man to win considerable personal support among Russians who were fed up with the widespread corruption and violence in their society.

Lebed claimed that the raft of political parties had "so clouded the brains of the average citizen" that the effects were worse than vodka. He also looked to Chile as his political model, arguing that General Pinochet had been able to revive Chile by "putting the army first" and "preserving the army as the basis for preserving the government." He was, he said proudly, a general, not a liberal.

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But he was more than an authoritarian. He took a firm stance against organizations supporting fascism, for example. His economic instincts may have been formed by communism, but during his campaign for the presidential elections in 1999, he asked Vitaly Naishul, a devotee of the liberal economist Frederick Hayek, to write his economic program. He never seems to have settled on a particular set of political views; his team of advisors changed constantly, on the national stage as well as in Krasnoyarsk.

In any case, intellect was not his attraction. Instead, as Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the liberal Center for Strategic Studies, said in 1996: "He is a man who believes in war, a man who says many foolish and dangerous things. But he has always been willing to speak the truth about Chechnya and the truth about Russia."

In 1996, in the battle for the presidency, Lebed came in third. But with 15% of the vote, he was still the rising star. To boost his own chances in the run-off with the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin made Lebed secretary of the Security Council. Swiftly, Lebed — and the credit was largely given to him — managed to broker a ceasefire and a peace deal with the Chechens. Soon after, Yeltsin fired him, accusing him of plotting a coup.

For a time, Lebed appeared to retreat from politics. But, in 1998, he was easily elected governor of Krasnoyarsk, a region of Siberia four times the size of France. He may have been far from Moscow, but Krasnoyarsk gave him a huge power base at a time when federal power was weak, and his governorship gave him a seat in Russia's upper house.

In 1999, Lebed's name cropped up as a possible presidential candidate or as a possible prime minister to the future President Vladimir Putin. Lebed may even have figured in the battle of oligarchs to find a successor to Yeltsin, a battle that Novaya Gazet suggested in 1999 led to the second Chechen war. Whatever the circumstances of that murky period, Lebed continued to head the Peace Mission in the North Caucasus, which works toward promoting reconstruction and negotiation in Chechnya. The mission has freed many prisoners of war and hostages, sometimes paying for their release.

Lebed's brother, Aleksei Lebed, who is the governor of the neighboring Siberian republic of Khakassia, has reportedly asked Putin to allow the general to be buried in Moscow's Novodevichye cemetery, where many of the Russian and Soviet élite have been laid to rest. He has also reportedly asked Putin to call a national day of mourning in his brother's memory.

A longer version of this article is available at: www.tol.cz