General Lebed in the army and big politics

In the summer of 1992, in Moldova, most recently become an independent country, events took place, which today, more than two decades later, they prefer not to remember. Only the inhabitants of Transnistria remember how large the scale was acquired by the inhabitants of Transdniestria, remembering only the inhabitants of Odessa who saw the consequences of the massacre and through local TV channels (these footage did not repeat anywhere), and personally, watching refugees from Tiraspol and Bender, who came massively to Suddenly became a border town. As in the war, they got in freight cars.

Soon the name of the hero who resolutely ended this slaughter became known. According to eyewitness accounts, General Lebed covered the Moldovan troops who were preparing to cross the Dniester with artillery fire, and then threatened to enter with their commandos to Chisinau and restore order there.

Paratroopers rarely occupy high army posts. They are not taught strategy, the fate of "winged infantry" - the solution of tactical tasks. At the turn of the last decades of the Soviet Union, the landing party began to be used to resolve interethnic conflicts. General Lebed commanded the dispersal of the Tbilisi rally in April 1989, when 18 of its participants died. After he ridiculed the attempt to extradite these acts of protest for exceptionally peaceful ones, asking simple questions about the sports preparation of the old woman, which the paratrooper could not catch up with, he was talked about.

A veteran of Afghanistan, a chevalier of four orders, he really stood out among the "parquet generals." Courageous appearance combined with the aphoristic manner of polemics and a gloomy, but subtle sense of humor, which someone mistakenly considered soldierly coarse. The ability to express the essence of the situation figuratively and clearly, neglecting the norms of political correctness, was the feature that characterized General Alexander Lebed.

At the same time, the outward directness concealed the reasonable caution displayed in 1991 during the events of the August putsch and two years later when the tanks shot the building of the Supreme Council. Then it was easy to be among the "stranglers of freedoms", "satraps" and put on his career a fat cross. No, General Lebed did not refuse to carry out the order, but he did not show any special initiative that was so characteristic of his character.

But in 1996, when all the Kremlin leadership withdrew from solving the Chechen problem, he signed an agreement with the leaders of the militants, which at first many people understood as betrayal. In fact, as a true military man, General Lebed realized that victory by the methods used by the war was impossible to achieve, it took a breather to make the right decisions.

Of course, such a colorful figure could not remain without the attention of the then political technologists. In the hope of taming the charismatic military, popular in the troops and the people, then the rulers of the country's destinies made him an attractive proposal, the essence of which was to distract the votes of some of the presidential candidates. General Lebed agreed.

Political career brought him to the governor's seat in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. And in this process Boris Borisovich Berezovsky's desire to observe the interests was looked through, financing campaign "a black cash". However, the expectations did not quite come true.

Swan was not a very successful leader. Manage the edge was more difficult than the landing regiment. The battle with the criminal authority Bykov ended in a tactical victory, but in general the economic successes of the region left much to be desired.

The death of General Lebed in a plane crash caused a wide public response. Most of the citizens of Russia refused to believe in its coincidence. It seemed to many that a very real contender for the presidential post had been eliminated, which would have led the country to a real military order.

The facts, rather, refute this opinion.