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The Yeltsin-Lebed deal was in the works even before the first round of voting on June 16. The two men were dickering as early as last February, and as recently as two weeks ago, Lebed rejected an offer to become Defense Minister. Along the way one of Yeltsin's advisers had an inspiration: they should help Lebed's campaign but keep it independent, since on his own he would do better at pulling away nationalist votes from Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. After weakening Yeltsin's opponents in the first round and making a strong showing himself, Lebed would then ally with Yeltsin. Just weeks before the first vote, a deal was struck.
Television is largely controlled by Yeltsin, and Lebed began appearing more frequently on news shows in the last weeks of the campaign. In addition, his commercials seemed to flood the airwaves. Alexei Golovkov, chief of staff to the reformist Cabinet in the early 1990s, was recruited from the government benches in the Duma to help mastermind Lebed's efforts. One major Moscow weekly received 2 billion rubles from the Yeltsin campaign to cover the cost of running Lebed's election propaganda.
The strategy worked, and now Yeltsin must try to win Lebed's 11 million voters at the polls next week. If it was Yeltsin and Lebed's plan to prove that the general is not merely a figurehead, they set to it quickly. In a TV interview last week Lebed claimed that he had fired Grachev. Lebed has been denouncing and sneering at the Defense Minister for years, so his arrival in the Kremlin did mean Grachev would have to go. But in fact it was the President who told his Minister he was out.
Lebed went on to claim that a group of top generals, some of those Grachev had called "my creatures," had hurried to the Ministry of Defense to encourage Grachev to stay on and persuade him to put troops on alert to "bring pressure on the President." Said Lebed: "I took measures of my own. I told the Ministry not to send Grachev's directives to the troops. Then I visited the headquarters of the Moscow military districts, where I met very decent people." According to defense analyst Vitali Shlykov, "Official cars kept rushing between the Ministry and the dachas of [Grachev loyalists]." Korzhakov and Mikhail Barsukov, head of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, also got busy on the phone and sent aides to calm down military units around the capital. The crisis eased, and the generals later denied any attempt to pressure the President, saying they had gone to Grachev's office only to bid him a fond farewell.
Then the following day brought another crisis. On orders from Korzhakov, officers of the presidential security service arrested two Yeltsin campaign workers coming out of the White House, the Russian government headquarters in central Moscow. The two were Sergei Lisovsky, who is an advertising executive, and Arkadi Yevstafyev, an aide to campaign manager Anatoli Chubais. Korzhakov claimed that the two were trying to remove a box full of foreign currency without proper authorization, a charge Lisovsky denies. They were held overnight for questioning but were released, with a warning to keep their mouths shut, after news of their detention hit the national television news.