Yeltsin’s Fired Aide Wins Parliament Seat

The man President Boris N. Yeltsin sacked as his chief bodyguard last summer wound up the first part of his comeback plan Monday by winning a parliamentary seat from the central Russian town of Tula.

Now Russians are waiting nervously to see how quickly the triumphant Alexander V. Korzhakov, whose place in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution, will carry out part two of his plan--to get revenge on his many political enemies by revealing the secrets he learned as a Kremlin insider.

“Anyone who’s got anything to fear from such revelations should be scared,” smirked the round-faced Korzhakov, interviewed on Russian television amid word that he had won election to the Duma, the lower house, with 26% of the vote among a crowded field.

“I know there are plenty of people with something to fear out there, although I never specially set out to collect compromising material to blackmail anyone with,” he added in an interview with the daily Izvestia.

Korzhakov knows more Kremlin secrets than most. Until liberals managed to squeeze him from power last summer, the former mechanic and KGB man controlled all access to the president. His loyalty to Yeltsin over 11 years of service made him the president’s most trusted aide, friend and drinking buddy.

But a noisy settling of scores after the first round of the presidential election in June--between Korzhakov’s secretive, conservative clique and a group of young liberals headed by Yeltsin’s current chief of staff, Anatoly B. Chubais--left the bodyguard out in the cold. For weeks afterward, Moscow’s liberal newspapers were full of scandals about Korzhakov’s allies, accusations that they were involved in top-level corruption, extortion and murder; investigations of these, however, went nowhere.

Now, liberals fear, the tables could be turned on Chubais’ men. With a Korzhakov victory, “the compromising material which he has only threatened everyone with so far will probably start being published . . . and this will lead to a new spiral of political instability,” influential television anchorman Yevgeny Kiselev said before the results were announced.

Yeltsin loyalists were appalled by the Tula vote. “Judging by [Korzhakov’s] election speeches, his determination to return to power is directed primarily at satisfying his own ambitions. This is hardly what the people of Tula need,” said Alexander I. Kazakov, Chubais’ deputy. Sergei A. Filatov, head of the coordinating council for Russian regional elections, added: “As a lawmaker, Korzhakov is a zero.”

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Since being fired, Korzhakov has formed an unlikely alliance with the seemingly incorruptible strongman of Russian politics, Alexander I. Lebed, who also was ousted last year in what was interpreted as an attack by Chubais. Lebed is running for the governorship of the Tula region next month.

Both the alienated tough guys openly detest Chubais, whom they hold responsible for their downfalls. Neither has much love left for the ailing Yeltsin either.

Lebed, who wants to become president, has called for Yeltsin to admit he is too ill to serve and to step down. Korzhakov is blunter still about current rulers: “In a word, our present authorities are powerless. And, in a man’s world, this is state impotence.”