24.10.1996

Lebed the terrible

The latest developments in Russia have been dramatic, but also quite typical: intrigues being pursued at the top of society by officials posturing like egotistical actors in a play, while those below look on with indifference or contempt, but do not themselves climb onto the stage.

The theatrical parallel is an apt one: the evening after Aleksandr Lebed was sacked as secretary of the Russian Security Council, he went to the theatre with his wife. As Moscow radio pointed out, he now has plenty of leisure time in which to pursue such pastimes. The play was The death of Ivan the Terrible. Lebed said seeing it would teach him how to rule.

A minor but revealing event took place after the play ended and Lebed and the rest filed out of Moscow’s Maly Theatre. When he appeared in the exit, a crowd of bystanders burst into applause. It was not the play’s quality they were applauding. Clearly Lebed is a man with a political future.

Lebed was originally made secretary of the Security Council as a reward for throwing his support behind Yeltsin. He went down to Chechnya in an attempt to settle the conflict, which the badly equipped and poorly led Russian troops were losing. Lebed has in fact managed to bring off a deal, and the fighting has more or less ceased.

The Chechen war is deeply unpopular in Russia, more so probably than the war in Vietnam was in the USA. Anyone who looked halfway like settling it was likely to reap major political rewards. Lebed has gone even further. At parliamentary hearings on October 15, he proceeded to hurl accusations at interior minister Anatoly Kulikov, in particular for negligence in allowing thousands of separatist guerrillas to retake most of the Chechen capital, Grozny, back in August. Lebed also said he was looking into the causes of the Chechen conflict with a view to identifying and punishing those responsible for starting it.

A full-scale feud broke out between him and Kulikov, with other conflicts erupting elsewhere in the Russian leadership. The former head of Yeltsin’s security service, Aleksandr Korzhakov, who was himself sacked some time ago, has linked up with Lebed and denounced other figures in the Russian establishment.

In the meantime Yeltsin has been a figure in the background, showing all the signs of being seriously ill. Foreign diplomats and other Russia-watchers have taken to studying TV pictures of Yeltsin during rare appearances. Sometimes he looks better than at other times, but when he announced Lebed’s sacking he appeared rather ill and shaky. His heart operation has been postponed, but still looks like going ahead. Most of the infighting by Lebed and others seems to be a fight over the succession to Yeltsin.

Lebed looks set to resume his political career after his sacking. Far from being a setback, his loss of office will probably help him by putting him into the opposition. And there is much to oppose in Russia. As winter approaches, more and more workers are not being paid their wages and, crucially, soldiers are among those who are being pushed deeper into misery and want.

A widespread phenomenon in the Chechen war was half-starved Russian soldiers selling their weapons to Chechen separatists. The complaints and even threats from Russian soldiers and officers are rising to a crescendo, with dark hints of military coups. A sign of this came in the liberal newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, on October 17, when an open letter from a group of officers on the general staff complained to defence minister Igor Rodionov (another target of Lebed’s criticism) about the misery of soldiers and their families, and accused Yeltsin crony Chubais “and other scum” of preparing to sell Russia’s military establishment to Nato. The letter ended by saying that those who drafted it were desperate enough to try anything. A similar open letter five years ago (though not principally from soldiers) preceded the August 1991 state of emergency declaration.

In the meantime Lebed, who has a certain Bona-partist charisma which appeals to many Russians, not only Maly theatre-goers, looks like he is ‘preparing for power’. Whether he will make his move by heading a coup or by contesting an election is anyone’s guess. However, this admirer of the Chilean dictator Pinochet and barely concealed thug can offer little beneficial to Russians in the long as opposed to the short term, and nothing at all to Russia’s working class.       

The loss of Yeltsin would undoubtedly threaten instability in a country which demands a strong leader to hold it together amidst political and economic turmoil. In the leadership joust that is already emerging we should not rule out the figure of Gennady Zyuganov, who led the Communist Party of the Russian Federation to electoral success in the duma and gave Yeltsin a close run in the presidential elections.

Bourgeois commentators were at first surprised to see ‘communists’ reconstituting themselves and being elected back into power in Eastern Europe. We should not rule out such a turn of events in Russia either. At the moment it seems to depend on who can play the nationalist patriotic card the strongest, and the reformed ‘communists’ have shown themselves quite willing and able to olay this card when necessary.

John Craig