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Yeltsin and Grachev grew tired of Lebed's criticism, particularly on the war in Chechnya, and forced him out of the army in June 1995. When he took off his uniform and put on a suit, he began modulating his views and his voice. Where he had previously warned that expansion of NATO eastward could bring on World War III, he now became relaxed about it. He says Russia should spend less time opposing NATO's plans and more time reducing and reshaping the Russian military to show it is no threat to the West. At home he increasingly takes the role of a no-nonsense problem solver and calls his platform an "ideology of common sense." He favors the free market and says the state should protect it. "Eliminate crime," he says. "Destroy the market of bribes...Create understandable, clear laws. The state must be a wolfhound that would protect the economy, protect people and the results of their work." As for Chechnya, he says, bring the Russians--military and civilian--back to Russia and let the Chechens decide their fate by referendum. (Lebed has an unexpected problem dealing with the war. When he arrived at his office last week in the Defense Ministry, he found that all the documents relating to Chechnya were missing.)
As his thinking has matured, Lebed has retained his former image of honesty, courage, incorruptibility. No one knows if he can transfer his votes to Yeltsin, though he says he can swing most of them. That will be easier if his voters believe he has a real role in the next Yeltsin administration, and events last week seemed to demonstrate he does. Yeltsin brought in another soldier in the 1991 election--Alexander Rutskoi--who was then frozen out of decisionmaking. That will not happen to Lebed, his former colleagues insist. Says Colonel Baranets: "Rutskoi did not have the armed forces behind him nor 11 million voters. If Yeltsin thinks he can exploit Lebed and then drop him, he should think twice."
And how does Yeltsin look at the end of a wild week in Moscow? Like a winner. If he is not reborn, he is reincarnated as the activist, decisive populist he once was. Russians can see in him again the battler who stood atop a tank to face down the Soviet army. They can also see a leader who was strong enough to purge the men who were giving him a bad name, even those he considered his personal friends. Pragmatists and reformers are in the ascendancy, and the forceful chief executive has re-emerged. His biggest worry now is overconfidence. If his supporters stay home next week, assuming he has won, he could still lose.
--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly, John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and Dean Fischer/Washington