Aleksandr Lebed
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Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ле́бедь) (April 20, 1950–April 28, 2002) was a Russian Lieutenant General and popular politician, who was killed in a Mi-8 helicopter crash.
Alexander Lebed was the commander of the 106th Airborne Division from 1990 to 1991. Lebed had come to Russian national attention after the Soviet Coup of 1991, in which a conspiracy of old-guard Communist hard-liners sought to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev's government and reverse his reforms. At the height of the crisis, the Army had been ordered by Communist hard-liners to surround the White House, the seat of the Russian parliament. General Lebed was given orders to send tanks but never took any action against the parliamentarians and Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russian SFSR. Later, Lebed was promoted and became deputy to the Commander of Russia's Airborne Troops, general Pavel Grachev.
After seeing action violently quelling dissent in the Caucasus during the 1980s, including brutally dispersing a pro-independence rally in front of the government building in Tbilisi Georgia that left twenty dead, Alexander Lebed was from June 1992 the commander of the 14th Russian Army, based in Moldova, playing a major role in the Conflict in Transnistria and Gagauzia crisis.
On May 30, 1995 he resigned his commission to enter the political arena of post-Soviet Russia. In the elections to the State Duma in December 1995, Lebed headed the list of a moderately nationalist party Congress of Russian Communities (Конгресс русских общин). The party did not manage to pass the 5% barrier to get seats in the parliament, but Lebed himself was elected in a single constituency.
Lebed ran as a candidate in the 1996 Russian presidential election and finished third with 14.5% of vote in the first round of voting. Two days after the first round, the incumbent president Boris Yeltsin appointed Lebed to the post of the Secretary of Security Council of the Russian Federation and the President's National Security Advisor. Lebed in turn endorsed Yeltsin in the runoff election two weeks later and Yeltsin won the runoff.
Lebed's politics were distinctly military. He endorsed Augusto Pinochet's success in Chile, saying in an article "preserving the army is the basis for preserving the government."
As a skilful politician, Lebed, who was an author of several poems, on advice of his political technologists began to growl and expressly use fourletter words during his public appearances, representing an "awful Russian nationalist".
As chairman of the Security Council, Lebed led negotiations with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and signed agreements in the Dagestan town of Khasavyurt which ended the First Chechen War in August 1996. He was sacked from the Security Council by President Yeltsin in October 1996, following Lebed's major conflict with the influential Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov.
On September 7, 1997, an alarming story broke in which Lebed alleged during an interview with the TV newsmagazine Sixty Minutes that a hundred of Soviet-made suitcase-sized nuclear weapons designed for sabotage "are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia". Government of the Russian Federation rejected Lebed's claims and stated that such weapons had never been created [1]. However, GRU defector Stanislav Lunev confirmed that such nuclear devices existed and speculated that they possibly have been already deployed [2]
In May 17, 1998, Lebed won the election for the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai. He served in this position until his death in a controversial helicopter crash on April 28, 2002, popular with the military to the last. Official cause of the crash was the collision of the helicopter with electric lines during a foggy weather in the Sayan Mountains. His death is surrounded by several conspiracy theories.
[edit] References
- ^ "Suitcase Nukes": A Reassessment, 2002 article by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies
- ^ Stanislav Lunev. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: The Autobiography of Stanislav Lunev, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998. ISBN 0-89526-390-4
[edit] External links
| Preceded by Oleg Lobov |
Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation 1996 |
Succeeded by Ivan Rybkin |
| Preceded by Valery Zubov |
Governor of the Krasnoyarsk Krai 1998-2002 |
Succeeded by Alexander Khloponin |
