The Warrior Who Would Rule Russia

Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996. Presumed first edition/first printing. Trade paperback. Very good.. xvii, [1], 125 pages. Illustration. Footnotes. Lambeth draws on over two years of interviews with Lieutenant General Aleksandr I. Lebed to construct this first and only detailed portrait. From Wikipedia: "Alexander Ivanovich Lebed, April 20, 1950, Novocherkassk April 28, 2002, Abakan) was a Russian lieutenant-general and politician. He placed third in the 1996 Russian presidential election, with 14.5% of the vote nationwide. He later served as Russia's Secretary of the Security Council and as governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia's second largest region. He served four years in the latter position, until his death, following a Mi-8 helicopter crash....Lebed ran as a candidate in the 1996 Russian presidential election and finished third with 14.5% of vote in the first round of voting, behind both incumbent president Boris Yeltsin and Communist Party of the Russian Federation leader Gennady Zyuganov. Two days after the first round, Yeltsin appointed Lebed to the post of the Secretary of Security Council of the Russian Federation and the President's National Security Advisor. Lebed in turn endorsed Yeltsin in the runoff election two weeks later and Yeltsin won the runoff. As a military man in the political arena, Lebed argued for "preserving the army is the basis for preserving the government" while describing Pinochet as having managed to revive Chile by "putting the army in first place." As chairman of the Security Council, Lebed led negotiations with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and concluded agreements in the Dagestan town of Khasavyurt which ended the First Chechen War in August 1996. He was fired from the Security Council by President Yeltsin in October 1996, following Lebed's major conflict with the influential Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov. On September 7, 1997, Lebed alleged during an interview that a hundred of Soviet-made suitcase-sized nuclear weapons designed for sabotage "are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia". The government of the Russian Federation rejected Lebed's claims and stated that such weapons had never been created. However, GRU defector Stanislav Lunev confirmed that such nuclear devices existed and speculated that they possibly have been already deployed."