Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [44]
“Myself included?” inquired Kulikov.
“No, just your deputies.”
“Okay,” he said with relief. “I will send someone to process them officially.”
Gen. Alexander Lebed knew that Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov was plotting against him. They were on a collision course, and it seemed inevitable that one of them would eventually leave the government. He even joked that “two avians cannot live in the same hole,” a wisecrack on their names: Lebed means “swan” in Russian, and Kulikov means “snipe.” What particularly worried him was that Kulikov appeared to be forging an alliance with Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin chief of staff who was now effectively running the presidency.
Yeltsin seemed increasingly weak with every passing day. His heart surgery was scheduled for early November, and no one knew whether the old man would survive it. Constitutionally, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin was next in line, but most people regarded Lebed, who had finished third in the first round of elections, as the heir apparent. Except among the Party of War, Lebed had earned great popular credit by stopping the war in Chechnya. Should the old man die and an election be scheduled, he would easily beat Chernomyrdin. The last person that Chubais needed at the helm was the maverick chain-smoking general, who used to come to official Kremlin functions sporting white socks in black shoes and a bright checkered suit.
On October 13, Lebed made a fatal mistake. Seeking to boost his standing against Chubais, he joined forces with General Korzhakov, the discharged former head of Yeltsin’s security who still had a lot of influence in the security services. They appeared together at a rally in Tula, an industrial city one hundred miles south of Moscow. It was the heart of Lebed’s former constituency and the district from which Korzhakov planned to run for the Duma.
“I have found a worthy replacement,” declared Lebed in his deep bass, the same voice that only three months earlier had pledged to crush a would-be coup led by Korzhakov. Korzhakov spoke next. He accused Chubais of running an “unconstitutional regency” in the Kremlin.
By appearing with the secret police general who was anathema to the liberals, Lebed sealed his own fate. The reformers promptly joined forces with the Party of War to stop Lebed. Boris Berezovsky flew to New York to show George Soros the Russian Legion memo that Sasha had found in the September raid.
“You should not be misled by Lebed’s peacemaking role in Chechnya,” explained Boris to George. “People in the West compare him to de Gaulle, but he is at best a Pinochet, at worst a Franco. Would you care to share this with whomever it may concern in Washington?” Later that day I faxed the memo to my contact at the Russian desk of the State Department.
The showdown in Moscow was fast approaching. On October 15, after a hostile grilling by Duma deputies, Lebed delivered an incriminating file on Kulikov to Yeltsin’s office.
The next day the Snipe struck back at the Swan. Kulikov, a stocky man wearing his bemedaled general’s uniform, went on live TV to accuse Lebed of plotting to seize power by force and of undermining the Constitution with his Russian Legion, which (he explained by reading from the memo) would be tasked with the “identification, psychological treatment, isolation, recruitment or discrediting or liquidation of political and military leaders of extremist, terrorist and separatist movements as well as other organizations, whose activities threaten national security.”
The next morning Prime Minister Chernomyrdin called a top-level security meeting which turned into a shouting match between Lebed and Kulikov. In the end, Chernomyrdin dismissed the coup charges, but Lebed admitted to the authorship of the Russian Legion plan. This was enough for Chernomyrdin to accuse him of “crude Bonapartism.”
While Lebed tried to arrange an appointment with Yeltsin, his bodyguards arrested four undercover policemen who were tailing him, on Kulikov’s orders. By the