Alexander Lebed

Lieutenant General Alexander Ivanovich Lebed (Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ле́бедь; 20 April 1950 – 28 April 2002) was a Soviet and Russian military officer and politician who held senior positions in the Airborne Troops before running for president in the 1996 Russian presidential election.

He did not win, but placed third behind incumbent Boris Yeltsin and the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, with roughly 14% of the vote nation-wide.

Lebed later served as the Secretary of the Security Council in the Yeltsin administration, and eventually became the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, the second largest Russian region.

He served four years in the latter position, until his death following a Mi-8 helicopter crash.

He participated in most of Russia's military conflicts in the final decade of the Soviet Union, including the Soviet–Afghan War.

Alexander Lebed was born in the Cossack town of Novocherkassk, in the Rostov Oblast, in 1950.

In his youth he was not a bad student but preferred boxing and chess.

He grew up in poverty.

His father was a carpenter who was sentenced to seven years in a Gulag labor camp for arriving late to work twice, and witnessed the Novocherkassk massacre in 1962.

During that time he worked at a factory.

He was determined to become a paratrooper and joined the Ryazan Guards Higher Airborne Command School in 1969, becoming a cadet platoon and company commander while he was there.

In 1982, as an officer of the Soviet Airborne Troops, Lebed became a battalion commander in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there.

During his time in Afghanistan, Lebed became popular with the troops under his command.

He held this position until 1982 at which point he attended the Frunze Military Academy.

Among his duties was being a member of the funeral department during the period of many deaths among the Soviet gerontocracy, including three Soviet rulers.

From 1988 until 1991, General Lebed served as the commander of the 106th Guards Airborne Division, and later became the deputy head of the Russian Airborne Troops.

In 1988, Lebed became the commander of the 106th Guards Airborne Division.

He and his troops took part in the suppression of uprisings throughout the Soviet Caucasus, in Georgia (1989) and Azerbaijan (1990), in which he refused to use brutality to put down the protestors.

By 1991, Lebed held the rank of major general and became second in command of the Airborne Troops.

During the 1991 coup d'état attempt by Soviet hardliners against the new Russian government, he gained fame by refusing to follow orders to lead his forces against Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House, contributing to the coup's collapse.

It was also during that time that Lebed became a rival of General Pavel Grachev, Airborne Troops commander and future Russian Minister of Defense, due to what Lebed viewed to be his misguided military reforms.

Grachev would thus become his main rival.

The general also played a key role in ending the military phase of the conflict in Moldova between Transnistrian separatists and the Moldovan government in 1992, as the commander of the Russian 14th Guards Army which intervened and occupied the region.

It was reportedly because of Grachev that Lebed found himself deployed to Moldova in 1992, as commander of the 14th Guards Army.

There, in the conflict between Russian and Romanian factions, he intervened and used his position to broker a peace agreement, also providing protection to ethnic Russians.

Despite this, Lebed remained hostile to the separatist leadership, which he perceived as corrupt and stated that he was "sick and tired of guarding the sleep and safety of crooks."

After catching public attention with his actions in Moldova in 1992, the general came to be perceived as being an honest, anti-establishment patriot who stood against government corruption and wanted to restore order.

Lebed was not necessarily in favor of democracy and had a mixed opinion of it, but did praise both Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet—saying that Pinochet was able to revive Chile by "putting the army in first place" because "preserving the army is the basis for preserving the government"—and the French leader Charles de Gaulle.

General Lebed ended up joining the centrist, nationalistic political movement known as the Congress of Russian Communities.

The event, along with his past service record, ensured that Lebed was the most popular military officer in Russia during that time, and by 1994 he was considered to be a favorite candidate for potentially running against Yeltsin in the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Lebed himself described Yeltsin's performance as a "minus."

Some analysts both in the West and Russia compared him to Augusto Pinochet and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Popular among the army, when he resigned his commission in 1995 to enter politics, Lebed was also regarded as being charismatic by the public, in contrast to other Russian politicians in the 1990s, with polls showing his popularity being ahead of Yeltsin's for some time.

He retired from the army in 1995 in order to enter politics and won a State Duma seat in December of that year.

As the Secretary of the Security Council in the president's administration after the 1996 election he also led the negotiations that ended the First Chechen War.

After getting elected as governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai in 1998 with strong support from Anatoly Bykov, however, he decided to stay in that position and did not run for president, despite calls for him to do so.

Although Lebed was compared by some Western and Russian analysts to Augusto Pinochet and Napoleon Bonaparte, he was considered to be the most popular candidate for the presidential election of 2000 during the second term of President Yeltsin.

General Lebed held the position until his death in the 2002 helicopter crash.

Nonetheless, he remained against President Boris Yeltsin's decision to withdraw most of the 14th Army from Moldova, as he feared it would bring back chaos to the region.

General Lebed's actions in Moldova increased his popularity among the Russian public, and Russian nationalists in particular.