Yeltsin Rival Uses U.S. Trip to Proclaim: ‘I Don’t Bite’

A month after he was fired from his Kremlin job, Russian general-turned-politician Alexander I. Lebed wrapped up a five-day visit to the United States on Friday by assuring several hundred U.S. business leaders: “I am not a monster and a loose cannon. I do not bite.”

Candidly discussing his determination to win Russia’s next presidential election, the flamboyant Lebed said he hopes his first trip to the United States--the country he spent most of his adult life preparing to fight--will reassure Americans that he will cooperate with them if he gains power.

“I hope I have removed the grounds for calling me anti-Semitic, ultranationalistic and disdainful of organized religion,” Lebed said in a speech to the U.S.-Russia Business Council, referring to some of his controversial statements in the past.

For the Clinton administration, the visit by the former general was something of a hot potato: What to do with a man who has just been fired by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, still an American favorite, but who might, in time, win the presidency for himself?

The administration applied a formula that its predecessors had used with mixed results in similar circumstances--it assigned a senior, although not too senior, official to meet him and then sent him on his way. In 1989, then-President Bush treated Yeltsin that way when he was on the outs with the Kremlin.

On Thursday, Lebed met for about an hour with John Herbst, the deputy chief of the State Department bureau that deals with Russia and the other former Soviet republics. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a top Russia expert, dropped by but did not stay long.

Yeltsin got the “drop by” treatment on his first visit to Washington. Instead of the meeting with Bush that he had requested, Yeltsin was received by then-National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; during the meeting, however, Bush strolled through the room.

Yeltsin’s treatment by the Bush administration was widely criticized as a snub of the man considered to be the democratic alternative to then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Lebed may also feel slighted. After all, he finished a strong third in the first round of Russia’s presidential election earlier this year--which ended with Yeltsin’s election to a four-year term--and served a stormy four-month tenure as the president’s Security Council chief. But if so, he concealed it well.

In the only public appearance of his visit, Lebed said he has been subjected to an “information vacuum” by the Russian press and television since his ouster from the Kremlin. But he said he intends to attract attention back home by making news abroad.

During his stay, he met privately with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), probably the Republicans’ most-respected foreign policy spokesman.

Lugar said after the meeting that Lebed had warned him that nuclear security in Russia is so inadequate that terrorists might be able to steal nuclear weapons. He suggested that the United States may want to help Russia protect its arsenal.

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But in the speech to the business council, Lebed’s priority was to reassure business leaders that U.S.-Russia relations will be in safe hands if he wins the next presidential election. Although he provided no details, he called for steps to improve the Russian business climate, cut taxes and crack down on gangsters.

He clearly was pleased by the attention he attracted at the business council.

Looking at a line of business leaders waiting to ask him questions after his speech, Lebed said: “What a line, what a waiting list. It is the first time I’ve seen a queue in the United States.”

Lebed, who spoke without notes and through an interpreter, took a swipe at U.S. plans to enlarge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include some of the new democracies in Eastern Europe that once were Soviet satellites.

Although he said he would not have a “hysterical fit” if the alliance expanded, he called on NATO to concentrate on combating terrorism, international crime and narcotics trafficking instead of preparing to defend its members against outside aggression.

“The slogan should be, ‘Security must not be dangerous,’ ” he said.