Yeltsin Foe Forms New Opposition Party

Alexander I. Lebed, the darling of the disaffected and political nemesis of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, resurfaced Friday after a mysterious two-month absence to stake his claim on the role of this nation’s leader-in-waiting.

Lebed reemerged onto the political scene with a freewheeling news conference, a feisty newspaper interview and the announcement that he is forming a new political party to present an opposition force to Yeltsin and his unpopular entourage.

“This will be a party for all of us who reject the extreme right and the extreme left,” Lebed declared at a founding conference for his new Russian People’s Republican Party.

Describing the new alliance as centrist and a “third force” between the Communists and the politicians now in power, he said he expects to draw support from service personnel, miners, small-business owners, disillusioned Communists, the working poor and those unhappy with the consequences of the last five years of rule by “so-called democratic forces.”

That list of Yeltsin detractors grows ever longer as a budget crisis has forced the government to delay payment of wages and pensions to millions of Russians whose livelihoods depend on the state.

Lebed remains the country’s most popular politician, despite his long absence from the public eye.

The 46-year-old retired general brokered a peace settlement in the bitter Chechen war in late August. The pact has stopped the fighting that took tens of thousands of lives over 20 months.

Moscow’s Center for International Sociological Research reported Friday that 65% of more than 5,000 respondents polled named Lebed their choice as man of the year in Russia.

By forming a new political movement and lashing out at Yeltsin anew, Lebed has signaled his intention to challenge the sitting president, whose job he has openly and impatiently coveted.

Yeltsin won reelection to a new four-year term in July after an all-out campaign of free spending to woo voters and neutralize opponents. But heart trouble forced him into an absentee presidency for the next five months. The 65-year-old leader returned to his Kremlin office just this week.

During his convalescence, Russia’s cash crisis worsened to such a degree that Yeltsin himself has denounced the current situation as “catastrophic.”

Lebed has been virtually unseen in Russian public since being sacked as Security Council chief Oct. 17, having taken a vacation after his ouster to contemplate the future and to visit the United States to gauge Western sentiment toward him.

He was seldom mentioned in Russian press reports and was so reticent during Yeltsin’s surgery and hospitalization that some politicians here speculated that he had somehow been compromised or bought off.

At his news conference and in an interview with the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Lebed immediately renewed his complaints about the current team in the Kremlin and shot down Yeltsin’s reform plans as unrealistic.

Yeltsin’s proclamations on army reform “smell of demagogy,” and his establishment of an all-powerful presidency undermines the development of genuine democracy, Lebed asserted.

While the former paratrooper lashed out at Yeltsin and deemed him too ill to govern, Lebed appeared to have backed off one political bombshell during his retreat.

His last public appearance had been at a nominating rally for Alexander V. Korzhakov, a former KGB general and Yeltsin bodyguard who is running for a seat in the state Duma vacated by Lebed when he briefly joined the president’s team last summer.

Korzhakov is deeply distrusted by most Russians and invariably figures in reports about shady trading deals arranged while he was in office, in sharp contrast to Lebed’s image as an anti-corruption crusader. At his news conference in the suburb of Golitsyno, Lebed denied that he planned to team up with Korzhakov and acknowledged that he “is not an angel.”

Lebed has made no formal announcement of how he will spend his time until the next presidential election in the year 2000.

But he has hinted broadly that he will seek the seat of governor of the Tula region in a March election. That post would also give the charismatic general a seat on the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, providing a podium for a long-term presidential run.