RISE OF THE GENERAL

By Bruce W. Nelan

In the traditional Russian bylina, or folk epic, a dashing warrior in shining armor rescues the good Czar from the evil influence of his scheming boyars. Much the same sort of tale seemed to be unfolding as a rapid-fire Kremlin drama last week. It began on Tuesday, two days after the initial round of the presidential elections in which retired Lieut. General Alexander Lebed made a surprisingly strong third-place finish and Boris Yeltsin came in first. In Yeltsin's office that day, Lebed, 46, a hero in a dark business suit, perched stiffly on the edge of an ornate chair. With a flourish, Yeltsin signed a decree, tucked it into a green cardboard folder and handed it to the general.

With that pen stroke, Yeltsin had hired the tough-talking maverick paratrooper for two jobs: the President's top national security adviser and secretary of the Kremlin's Security Council, which coordinates foreign and domestic policy. "This is not just an appointment," Yeltsin told reporters. "This is a union of two politicians and two programs. I will now make corrections in my own program in the areas of military reform, national security and the battle against crime and corruption."

Of course, Lebed's appointment to the Yeltsin team was an election move. Yeltsin, who took 35% of the vote last week, faces a runoff on July 3 against Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov, who received 32%. If Yeltsin can pull in most of the 14.7% Lebed collected, plus a few more percentage points from the seven other defeated candidates, he should be able to engineer a victory. Zyuganov has been campaigning for five months, still unable to boost the Communists' vote total above the one-third mark they received in the parliamentary elections last December. But the sudden alliance with Lebed also touched off a sequence of events so startling that they almost eclipsed the electoral calculations.

First, on Lebed's demand, Yeltsin fired his loyal but hugely unpopular Defense Minister, Pavel Grachev. Then on Thursday the President purged three more hard-liners, including the man closest to him, his drinking buddy and tennis partner Lieut. General Alexander Korzhakov, who served as chief of security. The firings amounted to an almost clean sweep of the so-called Kremlin war party, an inner circle of authoritarian, antireform power brokers. Their departure could lead to a quicker end to the war in Chechnya, which the fired officials had originally urged on Yeltsin, and a return to influence for some key reformers. Last week may have set the country on a new course for the post-Yeltsin era. On June 14 Yeltsin had observed that a future President might be in the race. Asked on Tuesday if he had meant Lebed, Yeltsin replied, "It's too early to say." Then he paused, smiled and wagged his finger, and added, "But you have understood me correctly."

The Yeltsin-Lebed deal was in the works even before the first round of voting on June 16. The two men were dickering as early as last February, and as recently as two weeks ago, Lebed rejected an offer to become Defense Minister. Along the way one of Yeltsin's advisers had an inspiration: they should help Lebed's campaign but keep it independent, since on his own he would do better at pulling away nationalist votes from Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. After weakening Yeltsin's opponents in the first round and making a strong showing himself, Lebed would then ally with Yeltsin. Just weeks before the first vote, a deal was struck.

Television is largely controlled by Yeltsin, and Lebed began appearing more frequently on news shows in the last weeks of the campaign. In addition, his commercials seemed to flood the airwaves. Alexei Golovkov, chief of staff to the reformist Cabinet in the early 1990s, was recruited from the government benches in the Duma to help mastermind Lebed's efforts. One major Moscow weekly received 2 billion rubles from the Yeltsin campaign to cover the cost of running Lebed's election propaganda.

The strategy worked, and now Yeltsin must try to win Lebed's 11 million voters at the polls next week. If it was Yeltsin and Lebed's plan to prove that the general is not merely a figurehead, they set to it quickly. In a TV interview last week Lebed claimed that he had fired Grachev. Lebed has been denouncing and sneering at the Defense Minister for years, so his arrival in the Kremlin did mean Grachev would have to go. But in fact it was the President who told his Minister he was out.

Lebed went on to claim that a group of top generals, some of those Grachev had called "my creatures," had hurried to the Ministry of Defense to encourage Grachev to stay on and persuade him to put troops on alert to "bring pressure on the President." Said Lebed: "I took measures of my own. I told the Ministry not to send Grachev's directives to the troops. Then I visited the headquarters of the Moscow military districts, where I met very decent people." According to defense analyst Vitali Shlykov, "Official cars kept rushing between the Ministry and the dachas of [Grachev loyalists]." Korzhakov and Mikhail Barsukov, head of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, also got busy on the phone and sent aides to calm down military units around the capital. The crisis eased, and the generals later denied any attempt to pressure the President, saying they had gone to Grachev's office only to bid him a fond farewell.

Then the following day brought another crisis. On orders from Korzhakov, officers of the presidential security service arrested two Yeltsin campaign workers coming out of the White House, the Russian government headquarters in central Moscow. The two were Sergei Lisovsky, who is an advertising executive, and Arkadi Yevstafyev, an aide to campaign manager Anatoli Chubais. Korzhakov claimed that the two were trying to remove a box full of foreign currency without proper authorization, a charge Lisovsky denies. They were held overnight for questioning but were released, with a warning to keep their mouths shut, after news of their detention hit the national television news.

Chubais went into action to protect his people. He notified Lebed, telling him there was an attempt to interfere with the final round of the election. Lebed turned up at his new office at dawn and told a group of journalists he would sort things out. "The only thing we have accomplished in five years was holding these elections," he said, "and now there has been an attempt to disrupt the second round. Any revolt will be put down, and harshly."

Chubais also made his case to Yeltsin that day after a meeting of the Security Council, at which Lebed took his seat as secretary for the first time. After talking with Chubais, Yeltsin announced that he was firing Korzhakov, Barsukov and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, the overseer of the military-industrial complex and reputed godfather of the antireform cabal. Korzhakov and Barsukov, the men who had been working to prevent a putsch, were suddenly ousted themselves. Yeltsin said he was tired of accusations that he allowed the hard-liners to run things, "as if the President were working for them."

Yeltsin did not link the firings to the detention of the campaign workers the night before, but others did. Reformers said the government had been split for months between a group that believed Yeltsin could win re-election and a faction led by Korzhakov that wanted to cancel the vote. Planting currency is an old KGB trick, and the hard-liners might have set up the campaign workers to embarrass the reformers; or the two men might really have been carrying foreign notes without proper documents, and the hard-liners simply seized on this infraction. In either case, they overplayed their hand and gave the reformers an excuse to go after them.

Since this purge the two most visible figures on the Kremlin stage after the President are Lebed and Chubais, a seemingly odd couple. Chubais is despised by large segments of the population for his role in dismantling the old Soviet industrial complex. Others admire his management of the program that put two-thirds of Russian enterprises into private hands, and in the West he is lionized for this achievement. After the Communists won most of the seats in the legislative elections last December, however, Yeltsin fired Chubais as a sacrifice. He took the humiliation, then bounced back in February and joined the campaign team, becoming co-chairman and managing Yeltsin's political comeback. For Chubais it is an astonishing comeback as well.

Lebed, a professional soldier all his life, has an image as a rough-hewn nationalist and patriot. As an airborne commander in Afghanistan, Tbilisi and the former Soviet republic of Moldova, he was famous for using force first and asking questions later, if at all. His troops wielded shovels to crack civilian skulls in rebellious Georgia and let fly with heavy artillery to protect Russian separatists from ethnic Moldovans. He was also fairly insubordinate. "He smashed the Russian army tradition of servility to superiors," says Colonel Victor Baranets, a staff officer at the Defense Ministry. "He calls a spade a spade and a scoundrel a scoundrel." That earned him so much respect that, according to military analyst Shlykov, the armed forces gave Lebed 47% of their votes last week.

Yeltsin and Grachev grew tired of Lebed's criticism, particularly on the war in Chechnya, and forced him out of the army in June 1995. When he took off his uniform and put on a suit, he began modulating his views and his voice. Where he had previously warned that expansion of NATO eastward could bring on World War III, he now became relaxed about it. He says Russia should spend less time opposing NATO's plans and more time reducing and reshaping the Russian military to show it is no threat to the West. At home he increasingly takes the role of a no-nonsense problem solver and calls his platform an "ideology of common sense." He favors the free market and says the state should protect it. "Eliminate crime," he says. "Destroy the market of bribes...Create understandable, clear laws. The state must be a wolfhound that would protect the economy, protect people and the results of their work." As for Chechnya, he says, bring the Russians--military and civilian--back to Russia and let the Chechens decide their fate by referendum. (Lebed has an unexpected problem dealing with the war. When he arrived at his office last week in the Defense Ministry, he found that all the documents relating to Chechnya were missing.)

As his thinking has matured, Lebed has retained his former image of honesty, courage, incorruptibility. No one knows if he can transfer his votes to Yeltsin, though he says he can swing most of them. That will be easier if his voters believe he has a real role in the next Yeltsin administration, and events last week seemed to demonstrate he does. Yeltsin brought in another soldier in the 1991 election--Alexander Rutskoi--who was then frozen out of decisionmaking. That will not happen to Lebed, his former colleagues insist. Says Colonel Baranets: "Rutskoi did not have the armed forces behind him nor 11 million voters. If Yeltsin thinks he can exploit Lebed and then drop him, he should think twice."

And how does Yeltsin look at the end of a wild week in Moscow? Like a winner. If he is not reborn, he is reincarnated as the activist, decisive populist he once was. Russians can see in him again the battler who stood atop a tank to face down the Soviet army. They can also see a leader who was strong enough to purge the men who were giving him a bad name, even those he considered his personal friends. Pragmatists and reformers are in the ascendancy, and the forceful chief executive has re-emerged. His biggest worry now is overconfidence. If his supporters stay home next week, assuming he has won, he could still lose.

--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly, John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and Dean Fischer/Washington

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY, JOHN KOHAN AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW AND DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON