Army Hero Is Many Russians’ Fantasy Leader

He is the Last Russian Action Hero. And as soon as Lt. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed opens his mouth, you begin to understand why.

His voice is so deep and reverberating that Russian Television sound engineers can’t get intelligible audio in his cavernous office. Its rumble has been compared to cannon fire.

And when Lebed lowers his head into its usual bullish posture, fixes his unwavering stare and says that he admires dictator Augusto Pinochet for turning the Chilean economy around while killing “no more than 3,000 people,” that voice can send shivers right to the heart.

When Russians dream of a leader with a “strong hand” who will sweep into power, drive out corrupt bureaucrats and impose order on the country’s chaos, Lebed often stars in their fantasy. This is the man, they say wistfully, who could become the Russian Pinochet.

Polls show that Lebed is the most popular officer in the demoralized Russian army and that he would have a shot at the presidency in 1996, although he denies any ambition to run.

“There can be no doubt that Lebed is destined to reach the summit of Russia’s Olympus,” said Alexander Golz of Krasnaya Zvezda, the army newspaper.

Lebed is also a strong contender for defense minister, favored for the post by three-quarters of Russian officers, if incumbent Pavel S. Grachev falls to accusations of corruption and incompetence.

Meanwhile, Lebed is a commodity that cynical, post-Communist Russia has in short supply--a hero. He is seen as the spiritual leader of the army, as the Rambo who would not abandon brethren caught on the perilous outskirts of the old empire.

“I’m indifferent to the fact that I happened to become a hero,” he boomed sternly. But “along with being a general, I’m a citizen, and if I see acts against the Russian state, I react. . . . But this is not exactly my business--it’s like the Russian saying that if you don’t catch a fish, a crayfish will do. I became a hero accidentally, against my own will.”

Lebed, now 44 and a soldier’s soldier since he was 16, fought as a paratroop commander in Afghanistan and took part in the Soviet crackdown on Azerbaijan in 1990. He defended Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s White House--without understanding what was going on, he later admitted--in the 1991 coup attempt.

But he became a nationalist idol only in 1992, when he put his foot down here in Tiraspol, capital of the self-proclaimed Trans-Dniester Republic on the Dniester River.

The region, populated mainly by Russians and Ukrainians, had declared its independence from the tiny Soviet republic of Moldova in 1990 in reaction to growing nationalism among the Moldovans, ethnic kin to the Romanians.

The resulting conflict simmered for months.

Then, in mid-1992, it broke into pitched battles that killed hundreds.

The 10,000-man 14th Army commanded by Lebed had been ordered by Moscow to stay neutral. But, Lebed recalled, “there are times when you have to not chatter but act. Everyone agreed it was a wild, stupid war that could lead nowhere, and nevertheless they continued fighting. So I decided to put an end to it firmly and resolutely, and that is what was done.”

As locals tell it, Lebed sent the Moldovans who were approaching Tiraspol such an artillery barrage that they turned tail and ran. When the city later celebrated its escape at a rally, admirers reportedly brought Lebed--whose name means swan in Russian--great white swans as offerings of thanks.

Since then, a shaky calm has reigned in Moldova, and Lebed has become known as the forceful peacemaker who ignored Moscow’s cautious policy on the former Soviet republics and came through for his fellow Russians.

That is an image with tremendous resonance in a former empire where about 25 million Russians found themselves living “abroad”--outside Russia--when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Pushed firmly out of the Baltics, scared out of volatile Central Asia and the Caucasus, an estimated 2.5 million Russians--and probably far more--have returned to burden relatives and city housing in the motherland.

Lebed describes himself as a man of action, but his prestige has continued to grow in recent months mainly because of his words: fightin’ words, pull-no-punches words.

For example, he denounced the decision to send Russian troops into breakaway Chechnya on Dec. 11 and then added slyly that he would be willing to command a regiment in the incursion, but on one condition: “if this regiment is made up of the children and grandchildren of our deputies and the children and grandchildren of Cabinet members.”

Flouting army discipline, Lebed has called for Grachev to resign and stay out of office until he proves himself innocent of corruption. He has described Yeltsin’s mode of running the country as “a minus” and accused Grachev of letting the army fall apart instead of truly reforming it.

“I’m sick of serving in an army that is known more and more as a thieves’ army,” he complained to the Ogonyok magazine recently. “Such an army has no right to exist--accused of all deadly sins and covered with dirt.”

He thumbed his nose at Madeleine Albright, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, after she said during a recent visit that the United States wants the 14th Army withdrawn.

“This is quite insolent,” he said at the time. “Two states (Moldova and Russia) are negotiating their disputes, and some third party butts in to tell them what they should do. On what grounds? It’s time all those uninvited advisers got a boot in the behind.”

If his statements have grown ever freer, that is probably because he has become such a force in the army that Moscow can no longer rein him in.

When word came during Lebed’s vacation last summer that the 14th Army was to be disbanded and that he had been offered a job commanding Russian troops in Tajikistan, his loyal troops put themselves on alert--effectively going on a military strike--until Yeltsin backed Lebed and rescinded the order.

Asked how he had managed to survive the move against him, Lebed smiled and cited the oft-quoted 19th-Century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev: “You can’t understand Russia with your mind; you can’t measure it by your own standards. Russia is in a league of its own. You can only believe in it.”

Lebed’s patriotism is of a potent brand and comes off as more honorable than the jingoist ramblings of would-be president Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky.

Sitting on Lebed’s desk at military headquarters here was a tome, “On the Russian National Character.” When he spoke to an assembly celebrating Artillery Day, he consoled his soldiers--who received bonuses of a measly $3--by saying that, despite these troubled times, “the glory of the Russian army has not faded, and that will be appreciated in time.”

Those words come as a balm to the beleaguered officers of the former Red Army. Lebed’s appeal, according to Kirill Svetitsky of the weekly Stolitsa magazine, stems from the impression he creates that “the honest but persecuted Russian officer has split off from the sinful and well-fed generals.”

The troops who have suffered in local conflicts around the former Soviet Union because of Kremlin waffling “see Alexander Lebed as their commander in their sweetest dreams,” Svetitsky wrote. “He personifies the image of a commander who can defend his own honor and not sell out his subordinates. . . . The army--the real army that sits in a tank and not in an office--carefully watches every word of his.”

Lebed watches his own words as well. He turns suddenly coy when he talks about the 1996 elections and who might benefit from the enormous voting bloc he can bring. He will say only that he likes “those who are for a strong statehood. I like entrepreneurs and producers but not those who are specialists at producing money from thin air with bank swindles.”

Despite predictions that he will make it to the top, Lebed seems patently unsuited to become president and admits it, declaring that he is used to commanding and could not stomach the endless debates and compromises that come with the presidency.

But the Defense Ministry is another matter. Lebed refused point-blank to discuss whether he would consider replacing Grachev.

His aide, Col. Mikhail Bergman, chief of the 14th Army’s military police, is less reticent, saying: “The troops see Lebed as a god. Grachev doesn’t exist for us anymore. . . . (Lebed) is the only person who can save not only Russia but the former Soviet republics, where people will soon start to kill each other again.”

Lebed’s strongman image appeals not only to officers but to the public: 25% of Russians believe the country needs a Russian Pinochet, according to polls.

As for Lebed, he has his own reasons for admiring the Chilean strongman--whose 16 1/2-year regime was widely criticized for its repressive policies and violations of human rights, including the torture and disappearance of thousands, before he relinquished power in 1990. Pinochet’s regime, by Lebed’s account, killed 3,000 people, while “here, sometimes more people get killed and no one is held responsible.”

“And Pinochet found a way to legitimately transfer power to a civilian government,” Lebed added. “And now the country is stable and flourishing.”

The new Russian romance with anti-Communist Pinochet raises the ominous question of whether a dictatorship in Russia, home of the Bolshevik “temporary rule” that lasted 74 years, would turn out as neatly.

Another concern: If Pinochet killed 3,000 people in a country of 11 million, does that mean it would be acceptable for a Russian ruler to kill the proportional amount, something like 45,000 people?

“The dream of a benevolent dictator” does not jibe with Russian history, wrote Golz of Krasnaya Zvezda. He argued that Russia needs Lebed, but not as a Pinochet, because “authoritarianism in Russia always evolves toward unlimited dictatorship.”

But Lebed sees mainly the positive in his Chilean model. He particularly praises Pinochet for bolstering the army’s status--a common Lebed theme. He has begun publishing proposals for revamping the military and restoring the honor of service.

“We stand before the real threat of the collapse of the armed forces,” he wrote in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper. “Could the Russian army stand before NATO or China or Islam? No.”

Even as he makes plans for all of Russia, Lebed has his hands full in Trans-Dniester, a largely industrialized chunk of land between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova that is home to fewer than 1 million people. Lebed and Bergman, his right-hand man, have declared their own little war against the region’s underground arms merchants and organized crime capos.

The sticky part is, they claim that the corruption goes right up to the Trans-Dniester Republic’s president, Igor Smirnov. Bergman alleges that Smirnov signed off on deals to ship purloined 14th Army weapons to other areas of ethnic conflict, and Lebed has called the Trans-Dniester leadership “a cesspool.”

If Lebed were free to act, Tiraspol could become a key testing ground of whether he can solve what many see as Russia’s greatest problem--crime.

He is more responsive to another widespread Trans-Dniester desire: that Lebed and his 14th Army, which is made up largely of local Russians and Ukrainians, stay put.

Russia and Moldova have agreed in principle that the 14th Army will be withdrawn within three years, with 65% of its materiel going to Russia and 35% to Moldova. Lebed opposes the deal vehemently, saying that the logistics would be nightmarish and the cost prohibitive, not to mention that the danger would be enormous of war breaking out anew.

Almost a dozen people interviewed on the streets of Tiraspol agreed.

“Without the 14th Army we won’t survive,” said factory worker Alexei Lukin, 49, an ethnic Russian. “They (the Moldovans) will strangle us. If the army’s not here, they’ll return.”