Popular Russian General Quits; May Run Against Yeltsin in ’96 : Politics: Commander of Moldova forces is viewed as a potential conservative challenger to ruling clique.

Russia’s most charismatic general, Lt. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, has resigned his army command to protest Kremlin policies and is widely believed to be preparing to run for political office--possibly challenging President Boris N. Yeltsin in 1996.

Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev signed Lebed’s letter of resignation Thursday. It is now up to Yeltsin to decide whether the 45-year-old war hero poses more of a threat from his post as commander of the 14th Army in Trans-Dniester or from outside the army as a political rival.

Though Lebed has said that he is uninterested in the presidency, nobody in Russia believes him--including the defense minister, who took Lebed’s resignation as a chance to belittle his longtime tormentor.

“Who is Gen. Lebed? He is an ordinary general,” Grachev said. “He wanted to serve and he has served in the army for 23 years. Now he has obviously decided to become some kind of political figure. We do not deny him. . . . Well, go in good health.”

In a recent interview, the tough-talking Lebed had once again turned his tongue on Grachev, saying that “it’s hard to swim in sulfuric acid . . . and it’s just as hard to serve in an army when you have long ago ceased to understand your defense minister.”

Credited for putting an end to a bloody ethnic conflict in Moldova and for blasting Russian political and military incompetence in Chechnya, Lebed is consistently ranked the most popular general in the Russian army and among the top 10 most popular politicians in the country.

The general said Thursday that he is resigning in protest over Kremlin plans to downsize the 14th Army command in Tiraspol, Moldova.

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Lebed has warned that weakening the Russian peacekeeping force could trigger “another Chechnya” in the breakaway Moldovan province, where hundreds of people were killed in 1992 fighting between ethnic Russian and Ukrainian secessionists and Moldovan nationalists.

The general also warned that the 14th Army’s huge weapons cache, if left poorly protected and seized by either side, would be enough to arm four divisions and rekindle a full-scale civil war.

The Russian Parliament has sided with Lebed, but the general complained Thursday that “it has been impossible to explain anything to [officials] in the Defense Ministry.”

Analysts said Thursday that Lebed’s resignation would likely only boost his soaring popularity among the many Russians who long for a strong, even dictatorial, leader to bring discipline to post-Soviet anarchy.

Lebed, who admires former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, speaks out against Russian moral decline and is untainted by the corruption scandals that have devastated the image of the once-beloved Russian army, seems made for the part. The Moscow newspaper Kuranty on Tuesday compared Lebed to Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling him “a Russian ‘Terminator.’ ”

“Man has teeth for more than munching,” Lebed said in an April interview. “You got to show them once in a while. Force makes the world go around.”

The general has objected to the U.S. pressure to withdraw the 14th Army from Moldova, criticizing what he sees as American efforts to “play the role of world gendarme.”

But he has been equally blunt in analyzing the shortcomings of his own countrymen.

“With customary submissiveness, the people are degenerating into poverty and filth, getting drunk and stealing,” he told the Prism newsletter last month, bemoaning Russia’s post-Soviet loss of spiritual identity and self-respect.

Political analysts said Lebed may have the right stuff for an increasingly cynical, nationalistic Russian electorate--minus the buffoonery and hatred of neo-fascist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky.

“He has one advantage in the present political climate: He has not been associated with anyone,” said Eugene Rumer, a Moscow-based military analyst for RAND Corp. “He sounds like a straight shooter who will tell it like it is and stand his own ground. And he is not of the ‘Party of Power,’ ” the centrist group of pro-Yeltsin apparatchiks and regional leaders formed last month under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin to fight the December parliamentary elections.

“There is room for a politician like Lebed at the grass-roots level,” Rumer said. “The problem is he doesn’t have a party machine, and he’s not likely to have one. If people could vote by pushing a button on a TV screen, he’d be in great shape.”

Lebed has refused offers to take up other command posts, saying if he leaves, no one else will take responsibility for protecting the lives of the civilians in Trans-Dniester. His resignation is likely to earn him the sympathy of his countrymen, who revere the underdog.

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Among the others considered likely presidential contenders in 1996 are Zhirinovsky, former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, reformer-economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky, Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov and Yeltsin.

But in a country where century after century the strong hand has always proved a repressive one, not everyone thrilled to the idea of a Lebed candidacy.

“We are afraid of Lebed,” Kuranty newspaper declared. “We fear that we may easily find ourselves not protected but smashed by his enormous fists.”