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April 30, 2002, 12:30 p.m. Lebed’s Legacy The verdict’s still out. By Martin Sieff

eneral, at your age Napoleon was dead." Factually, Georges Clemenceau's classic put-down of Gen. Georges Boulanger in France's Third Republic does not exactly fit Russian Paratroop Gen. Alexander Lebed, who died in a Siberian helicopter crash Sunday, but its spirit is accurate enough.

Twice, Lebed held the destiny of Russia in the palm of his hand in 1991 and 1996. He was convinced he would be, not a ridiculous Boulanger but a heroic Slavic Charles De Gaulle. But instead of becoming the Kremlin's military master, he ended up just another might-have-been.

It is common to say that many major historical figures are filled with contradictions. Lebed did not have enough of them. What you saw was what you got. His many Washington admirers were convinced there was more there. In vision, there might have been. But in political street smarts, there was a lot less. Ordinary Russians saw that first. So it was that Lebed rose like a meteor or a flaming comet on Russia's kaleidoscope political scene in the early 1990s only to fall just as fast.

He started out as a Slavic Clint Eastwood, tough as nails and a man of few words but every one of them sharp, witty, and wise. But he ended up a Russian Woody Allen, a motor mouth who could not stop talking compulsively — and often ridiculously — about everything.

There were many admirable qualities there, but nobody did more to undermine them than Lebed himself. Britain's World War II Labor Minister Ernest Bevin famously responded when told that his archrival Herbert Morrison was his own worst enemy, "Not while I'm alive, he ain't!" But as long as Lebed lived, his own worst enemy was too. So it was that the man who began as ridiculously overrated by pundits and politicians in Washington ended up being underrated in his own country. But he no one more to blame for it than himself.

Lebed was only 52 when his helicopter crashed into a power cable in a remote part of the huge, resource-rich Russian province, or oblast, of Krasnoyarsk that he had run — his critics claimed, into the ground — for the past four years. He was already a has-been in Russian poltiics and there was no likely scenario for any comeback either. Yet he had already crammed two remarkable careers into his truncated life.

He was a career soldier who rose in Russia's elite paratroop forces to serve with distinction in Afghanistan. Then he became a national hero in the troubled years of the collapse of Communism and its replacement with a still-shaky democracy. He came to national prominence as a military commander crushing secessionist movements and trying to end bloody ethnic clashes in the Caucasus in 1989 as last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, or restructuring, reform program disintegrated.

In 1991 his troops helped Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Communist Russia, prevent a last-ditch hard-line Communist takeover. He played a key pivotal role in persuading the Red Army High Command that they could only crush popular opposition to the coup bid at the cost of tens of thousands of dead and probable civil war. His experience in the Caucasus had made him the Red Army's top expert on crushing rebellious civilian populations. When he made that call, his fellow generals listened.

His national stature continued to rise in the early 1990s as he helped the embattled Russian ethnic minority in Moldova, a territory Stalin had seized from Romania in the 1940s, carve out their own autonomous, de facto independent territory of Transdniestria. His military successes, youthful dynamism, and straight-shooting talk contrasted dramatically with the alcoholic incompetence, endemic corruption, and machiavellian wiles and maneuvers of Yeltsin and his Kremlin court in Moscow.

In 1996, Lebed ran a strong and unexpected third behind Yeltsin and Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov in the first round of Russia's presidential election. Yeltsin — and many others — concluded that the president could not hope to defeat Zyuganov in the second-round runoff vote without the charismatic Lebed's support and the 11 million votes he commanded..

The two men struck a deal and Lebed's support did indeed prove crucial in helping propel Yeltsin into another term of office. As his reward, Lebed became national-security adviser and secretary of Russia's new security council. He rapidly brought Russia's first, disastrous war in Chechnya to an end. He briefly appeared to be the ailing Yeltsin's natural heir.

Yeltsin, an exceptionally heavy drinker even by Russian standards, also had a history of heart problems and throughout his second term in office there was a widespread expectation he might die at any time. No one then dreamed that he would outlive Lebed, but so it proved.

The tough, resilient, cunning old muzhik, or peasant, president rapidly succeeded in isolating Lebed, who made enemies rapidly in the power circles of the new Moscow. Lebed, who loved the sound of his own voice, blustered, threatened, and threw his weight around. Within months, Yeltsin had politically isolated and sacked him.

The billionaire oligarchs who had seized the commanding heights of Russia's industries and vast potential natural resources in the Yeltsin era all applauded Lebed's fall. The general still enjoyed widespread popular support. But he lacked the political intellect and discipline to organize a national party power base. And he also lacked the personal charm and political skills to cut any effective alliance with others who could.

Two years alter, in 1998, Lebed showed he still could command powerful public support by winning election as the governor of Krasnoyarsk, a vast Siberian region larger than France. It gave him an automatic seat on the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament and, apparently, a regional power base from which he expected to launch a campaign to succeed Yeltsin. But things did not work out that way.

First, Lebed proved an incompetent and abrasive governor. He took a region that had enjoyed far more prosperity and protection — in relative terms at least — from the catastrophic implosion of Russia's economy in the collapse of communism and led it into crisis and chaos. His national reputation plunged.

Then, in August 1999, Yeltsin appointed a new prime minister, the almost unknown Vladimir Putin.

Putin was the antithesis of the big, blustering, and blundering heroic soldier Lebed. He was a veteran security-services officer who had risen to command them. He was small but tough and precise. Where Lebed had the look of a boxer, Putin was a lifelong expert and devotee of judo,. His background and talents proved far better suited to winning power in Moscow and then holding it.

Lebed was charismatic. Putin was not. The Russian people had held high hopes for Lebed. They expected nothing from Putin. But Putin got things done. He stabilized Russia's macroeconomic situation. For people with jobs, pay started coming again and things started getting a bit better. Putin showed he could run Russia. Lebed could not even keep a grip on Krasnoyarsk. He feuded over control of its enormous aluminum industry with regional oligarch Anatoly Bykov.

Speculation is swirling in Moscow that his death was not an accident. State Duma member Alexei Arbatov pointedly refused to rule out sabotage as the cause of the fatal helicopter crash in an interview with state ORT broadcasting. President Putin pledged a "painstaking" probe into its causes.

Lebed died a political has-been; he never had any serious chance of taking power in Moscow from the moment he struck his ill-fated 1996 deal with Yeltsin. Yet the ideas he formulated during the latter half of the past decade were intriguing ones, far removed from the direction Russia is now taking.

He saw Russia taking its place as a central part of the concert of industrialized, democratic states alongside the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and Japan. There was talk that, unlike Yeltsin, he would be prepared to return to Japan the unproductive but strategically placed islands that the Soviet Union had seized at the end of World War II in 1945. And, especially in his last years as governor of Krasnoyarsk, he expressed a worldview that Russia's real, long-term enemy was China.

Where other Russian politicians painted the United States, Islamic fundamentalism, or the Turkic Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus as Russia's ultimate enemies, Lebed was convinced it was the Chinese. He claimed that in the decade since the collapse of communism, as many as 6 million Chinese had already streamed into the vast Russian Federation territories east of the Ural Mountains., he repeatedly warned that only 33 million ethnic Russians resided there, with an enormous population of 1.3 billion Chinese bursting at the seams right beside them, and no natural barriers ultimately there to stop them. He would have applauded the most recent demographic warnings of Pat Buchanan.

But his arguments made zero impact. Russian commentators and policymakers in Moscow feared the United States, not China. They regarded operations such as the U.S.-led NATO crushing of Yugoslavia by air bombardment in spring 1999 as evidence that the United States was determined to impose a unilateral New World Order of its own, regardless of the consequences for Russia.

The triumphant U.S. unilateralism celebrated by President Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, intensified when George W. Bush took the presidency and installed a group of hard-line hawks in the Department of Defense.

On June 15, 2001, Bush pledged in a Warsaw speech to expand NATO to include even the former Soviet republics of the Baltic States. That same day, Putin, the man who held the job Lebed had dreamed of having, created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or Shanghai Pact, with President Jiang Zemin of China and the leaders of the main Turkic Muslim republics of Central Asia. Russia had turned east, not west. And despite the strong — and still largely underrated in Washington — support that Putin gave the United States in its drive to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan, Russia's fundamental geopolitical orientation remains firmly set within Eurasia and linked to powers such as China, India and Iran. Lebed's dream was dead.

Putin has repeatedly shown the shrewd political skills Lebed so manifestly lacked. His own vision for Russia appears similar in domestic terms to Lebed — a prosperous, stable society with a healthy free market major sector to its economy, but still led by authoritarian, though not totalitarian means. But in foreign policy and tone, it is much more nationalistic and more closely tied to radical Middle East regimes and China than to the United States. Lebed might well have taken the opposite course.

Yet Lebed may still loom larger in history than he did in life. If Putin's policies prove successful and put Russia on a path to peaceful prosperity, the dramatic, charismatic paratroop general will soon be forgotten. But if Putin should fail and be toppled, or put Russia on a path of confrontation with the West — with potentially dire results — then Lebed may well be revered posthumously along with the likes of assassinated Czarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin or ineffectual pre-Bolshevik leader Alexander Kerensky as a tantalizing might-have-been of Russian history.

Lebed was full of life to the moment he died but he also died a political has-been. Ironically, he may loom larger in death than he did in life as one of Russia's many might-have-beens, yet another road not taken.

— Martin Sieff is senior news analyst for United Press International. This piece is based on a report for UPI.