As tough-talking Gen. Alexander Lebed is formally inaugurated this week as governor of Russia’s vast, remote and enormously rich region of Krasnoyarsk, many still fear he is a dangerous “man on horseback” in waiting.
It’s the no-nonsense look on his handsome, rough-hewn Cossack face. It’s the memory of how, when he was a younger officer in all those end-of-the-world garrisons, he used to punch out guys who gave anybody trouble. Finally, it’s the idea, untenable in this society, which has a long way to go before getting over communism, that a military man should become president of Russia.
That’s not at all the way I or the people closest to him see the charismatic Lebed. He is a strong leader, no question about it. But the more the Russians watch “Czar Boris” waste his time doing virtually nothing but moving his minions around like chessmen, the more they look for someone to actually do something!
He is also very much a man who “comes from the mountains,” or the leader who comes from the periphery of society to put things in order when everything is going wrong. There is an entire historical genre of this kind of leader, spanning the good and the bad: Napoleon, the Corsican; Hitler, the Austrian; Moses, the Hebrew in Egypt, to cite a few.
But unless everything he has said and done within recent memory is cynically falsified, there is the other–indeed, the dominant–side to the 47-year-old Lebed, which makes his a most unusual blend of leadership characteristics. He is usually rational. He speaks to the Russian people’s suffering in terms of actually doing something to alleviate it, rather than acquiring personal power or gain from it. And he clearly sees Russia in relative terms. He eschews the cloying Russian grandiosity to say repeatedly that Russia can be in the future, at best, a “middle-status country” and a “perfect intermediary state between Europe and Asia,” but not a superpower.
When he is inaugurated as governor on June 5, he takes over Russia’s second-largest territory, the huge state of Krasnoyarsk way out in central Siberia. It is an area a quarter the size of the United States, with poor people living in misery in the midst of some of the most stunning natural wealth in the world. (It produces 80 percent of Russia’s nickel, 75 percent of its cobalt, 70 percent of its copper, 40 percent of its timber and 15 percent of its coal.)
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“For people to live so badly in a land that is so rich means its rulers are either fools or thieves,” he told the voters during his months of campaigning. “I will change this.”
To change things, he is proposing rational, well-thought-out programs that could make a difference in place of the usual blend of demagogic promises that never seem to come true. Immediately, he will begin what he calls “earthy reform” or, in effect, land reform to stimulate production, effective local tax collection, and territorial legislation to guarantee foreign and domestic investors’ rights. And during this time, he will automatically become a member of the federal council, the upper house of parliament, which is composed of regional governors and leaders who are becoming increasingly powerful.
If he can begin to turn a key area like Krasnoyarsk around in the next year and a half–and if he can continue to capture and hold the imagination of all Russia–Alexander Lebed will be a formidable candidate for president in the 2000 Russian elections, which is just exactly what he plans.
But Lebed is also a study in new-style leadership. He is the son of Cossacks from the Russian south (an outsider). He is the impatient and angry, yet thoroughly rational, reformer and perhaps transformer (a modern, technically proficient leader). And he seems surely to be alone in filling the profound emotional, patriotic and psychological needs of a people (a charismatic savior) that the present Czarist/technocrat leadership is not addressing.
In fact, rather than introducing extremism into the political spectrum, if he is successful, his type of leader could skim the extremism from society. Lebed’s leading foreign policy adviser, Shalva Breus, explained this to me. “The most amazing thing these elections proved is that there are points in our political life which are not being taken into consideration by the political elites of this country,” he said. “Society is extremely tired, and today only the person who combines honesty, strength and patriotism can move society toward him. Lebed is the first person to combine all of those qualities, plus a clean background. Lebed says something and the people understand.”
Any people in times of trouble seek out a strong leader to fill the unbearable vacuum that the collapse of a nation or of an ideology inevitably leaves. Yet one sees in Lebed little of the dangerous demagoguery that too often attends those charismatic heroes.
What an interesting two years it is going to be!