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Chubais went into action to protect his people. He notified Lebed, telling him there was an attempt to interfere with the final round of the election. Lebed turned up at his new office at dawn and told a group of journalists he would sort things out. "The only thing we have accomplished in five years was holding these elections," he said, "and now there has been an attempt to disrupt the second round. Any revolt will be put down, and harshly."
Chubais also made his case to Yeltsin that day after a meeting of the Security Council, at which Lebed took his seat as secretary for the first time. After talking with Chubais, Yeltsin announced that he was firing Korzhakov, Barsukov and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, the overseer of the military-industrial complex and reputed godfather of the antireform cabal. Korzhakov and Barsukov, the men who had been working to prevent a putsch, were suddenly ousted themselves. Yeltsin said he was tired of accusations that he allowed the hard-liners to run things, "as if the President were working for them."
Yeltsin did not link the firings to the detention of the campaign workers the night before, but others did. Reformers said the government had been split for months between a group that believed Yeltsin could win re-election and a faction led by Korzhakov that wanted to cancel the vote. Planting currency is an old KGB trick, and the hard-liners might have set up the campaign workers to embarrass the reformers; or the two men might really have been carrying foreign notes without proper documents, and the hard-liners simply seized on this infraction. In either case, they overplayed their hand and gave the reformers an excuse to go after them.
Since this purge the two most visible figures on the Kremlin stage after the President are Lebed and Chubais, a seemingly odd couple. Chubais is despised by large segments of the population for his role in dismantling the old Soviet industrial complex. Others admire his management of the program that put two-thirds of Russian enterprises into private hands, and in the West he is lionized for this achievement. After the Communists won most of the seats in the legislative elections last December, however, Yeltsin fired Chubais as a sacrifice. He took the humiliation, then bounced back in February and joined the campaign team, becoming co-chairman and managing Yeltsin's political comeback. For Chubais it is an astonishing comeback as well.
Lebed, a professional soldier all his life, has an image as a rough-hewn nationalist and patriot. As an airborne commander in Afghanistan, Tbilisi and the former Soviet republic of Moldova, he was famous for using force first and asking questions later, if at all. His troops wielded shovels to crack civilian skulls in rebellious Georgia and let fly with heavy artillery to protect Russian separatists from ethnic Moldovans. He was also fairly insubordinate. "He smashed the Russian army tradition of servility to superiors," says Colonel Victor Baranets, a staff officer at the Defense Ministry. "He calls a spade a spade and a scoundrel a scoundrel." That earned him so much respect that, according to military analyst Shlykov, the armed forces gave Lebed 47% of their votes last week.