Yeltsin Appoints a Moderate to Replace the Brash Lebed

President Boris N. Yeltsin hastily appointed a loyal, moderate politician on Saturday to run his influential Security Council, two days after sacking the flamboyant would-be president, Alexander I. Lebed, from the post.

Ivan P. Rybkin, former speaker of the Duma, the Russian parliament’s lower house, has none of the menacing charisma of his ambitious predecessor and is unlikely to arouse the same deep enmities among other members of the Kremlin elite.

Rybkin’s two years running parliament showed him to be a suave negotiator.

His first words as security chief were aimed at calming fears that Lebed’s main achievement during four turbulent months in power--making peace with separatists in Chechnya--would be overturned and that war would resume between the rebels and Russian forces.

About 30,000 people were killed in 20 months of fighting in the breakaway republic.

“It is very important that our common wound, Chechnya, does not bleed any longer,” Rybkin said after being appointed secretary of the Security Council, national security advisor and presidential envoy to Chechnya.

Yeltsin fired Lebed with a televised flourish of his pen Thursday, signing a decree in front of millions of viewers to remove the popular ex-general from a position whose scope was steadily reduced during Lebed’s tenure.

Yeltsin blamed Lebed’s open presidential ambitions for sowing discord among members of his government, whose feuding has reached fever pitch in recent weeks as the ailing president prepares for heart bypass surgery later this year and hopeful successors present themselves on all sides.

Being thrown out of the Kremlin has done nothing to dampen Lebed’s presidential aspirations or to damage the fiercely straightforward military man’s standing as Russia’s most trusted politician.

Yeltsin brought Lebed into the Kremlin after the ex-general won 11 million votes in June during the first round of the presidential election, and Lebed’s popularity helped clinch Yeltsin’s reelection July 3. But the marriage of convenience quickly unraveled.

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Yeltsin, like Lebed a forthright man who finds it difficult to tolerate competition, found his new aide increasingly irritating. The powers he promised would accompany the Security Council job--control of military appointments and oversight of military reform--never materialized.

Lebed was kept out of the president’s sight as tensions worsened between Lebed and the two other leading Yeltsin aides, presidential chief of staff Anatoly B. Chubais and Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. Tensions at the top exploded last week, before Lebed’s firing, in a flurry of unproven allegations that Lebed was plotting a coup.

On Saturday, Lebed pronounced himself unimpressed by the new security chief who, he said, would complete the transformation of the Security Council from a once-powerful Kremlin organization into “a peaceful bureaucratic office of which no one will hear and no one will know.”

Rybkin is “unable to ensure any security for Russia, while there are a lot of challenges against our country,” Lebed told Interfax news service on Saturday.

By contrast, Lebed said, he would work toward a “civilized” relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization while waiting to begin campaigning for the presidency next time round.

“Rybkin will behave in the same way he used to in the state Duma, when deputies were fighting in the hall while he calmly pontificated from his chair,” Lebed remarked contemptuously.

Liberals from the parliament put a similar view of the gray-suited Rybkin more charitably.

“Rybkin is the most acceptable figure under the present circumstances and in the light of the present state of public opinion,” said Sergei Yushenkov, deputy chairman of the Russia’s Democratic Choice party. “He is not a confrontational figure and will snuff out all the conflicts that have arisen in society.”

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The plain-speaking Lebed’s flouting of the rules of deference and quiet deal-making by which the Kremlin is governed antagonized much of the establishment.

Rybkin, who turns 50 today, was elected to the Duma in December 1993 as a member of the Agrarian Party, but broke with it and became a Yeltsin supporter and parliamentary speaker.

Exerting a moderate influence on the quarrelsome parliament, which is dominated by angry opponents of Yeltsin’s rule, he steered the legislature away from clashes with the president.

His peaceable influence was sorely needed at the time.

An earlier parliament had fought so bitterly with Yeltsin that troops were called out in September 1993.