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."