Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed (Алексáндр Ивáнович Лéбедь) (April 20, 1950–April 28, 2002) was a Russian general and politician. He was very popular for his honesty and effectiveness, and at the time of his death many people thought he would be the next President of Russia. He was killed in a Mi-8 helicopter crash in April 2002.

Alexander Lebed had come to Russian national attention after the Soviet Coup of 1991, in which a conspiracy of old-guard Communist hard-liners sought to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev's government and reverse his reforms. At the height of the crisis, the Red Army had been ordered by the Communist hard-liners to surround the White House, the seat of the Russian parliament. The conflict essentially ended when General Lebed refused to order his tanks to fire upon the building and Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russian SFSR at that time, was able to exit the building and read a speech against the conspiracy on top of one of Lebed's tanks.

After seeing action violently quelling dissent in the Caucasus during the 1980s, Alexander Lebed was the commander of the 14th Russian Army, based in Moldova, from June 1992. The presence of his troops is generally accounted resposible for preventing a large-scale expulsion of Russian natives, though Lebed publicly expressed his disgust with the corruption and cronyism of Igor Smirnov the president of the pro-Russian Dniester Moldovan Republic currently being called Transnistria. On May 30, 1995 he resigned his commission to enter the political arena of post-Soviet Russia. 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. Two days after the first round, the incumbent president Boris Yeltsin appointed Lebed to the post of the chairman of Security Council of the Russian Federation. Lebed in turn endorsed Yeltsin in the runoff election two weeks later and Yeltsin won the runoff.

Lebed's politics were distinctly military. He endorsed Augusto Pinochet's success in Chile, saying in an article "preserving the army is the basis for preserving the government."

As a chairman of Security Council, Lebed led negotiations with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and signed the Khasavyurt Agreements which ended the First Chechen War in August 1996. He was sacked from the Security Council by president Yeltsin in October 1996, after a conflict between Lebed and Anatoly Kulikov , the minister of interior affairs.

In September 7, 1997, an alarming story broke in which Lebed alleged that the former USSR had lost track of some "suitcase-sized" nuclear weapons.

In May 1998, Lebed won the election for the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai. He served in this position until his death in a helicopter crash in bad weather 2002, popular with the military to the last.

External link

• Lebed biography http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dmiguse/Russian/albio.html
• "Alexander Lebed and suitcase nukes" http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/Lebedbomb.html