Alexander Ivanovich Lebed

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Alexander Lebed at a press conference in Moscow in 1996
Monument in Bender, Prednistrovie (Transnistria)

Alexander Ivanovich Lebed ( Russian Александр Иванович Лебедь ; born April 20, 1950 in Novocherkassk ; † April 28, 2002 in Yermakowski rajon , Krasnoyarsk region ) was a Russian general and politician .

Life

Lebed was the most famous and respected general among the Russian population in the 1990s.

Although he wanted to become a pilot, he came to the airborne troops of the Soviet Army and graduated from the military academy in Ryazan . During the Afghan war Lebed was briefly (1981-1982) commander of a combat battalion . In one of the fights he suffered a concussion. After the assignment, he studied from 1982 for three years at the Frunze Military Academy . Between 1985 and 1986 Lebed commanded a paratrooper regiment in the city of Kostroma . From 1988 to 1991 he was commander of the 106th Guards Airborne Division in Tula . On February 17, 1990, he was promoted to major general.

Under his leadership, paratroopers broke up a non-violent demonstration in front of the parliament building in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989 . 20 Georgians were killed and hundreds injured. The incident led to high tensions in Georgia and was one of the triggers for the declaration of independence of the Caucasus Republic in 1991. In January 1990, he commanded a contingent of Soviet airborne troops sent to Baku when ethnic conflicts between Azerbaijanis and Armenians broke out there.

During the August putsch in 1991, he and his airborne troops were ordered to Moscow by putschists of the GKTschP to suppress demonstrations. Lebed, however, soon sided with Gorbachev and Yeltsin against the putschists, and his soldiers protected the White House in Moscow.

From June 1992 he succeeded Yuri Netkachev as the commander of the 14th Guards Army of the Russian Armed Forces stationed in Moldova (in the Transnistria region ) . Lebed put an end to the military conflict over the city of Bender in the Transnistrian conflict and signed the peace treaty on July 21, 1992 as a negotiator. In public statements he presented himself as a peace-maker in this conflict, at the same time he accused the Moldovan opposing side of ethnic cleansing and insulted them as fascists . He criticized the Transnistrian politician Smirnov and his entourage as a corrupt war profiteer and described his superiors in the Russian military apparatus as incompetent, which earned him criticism from all sides. In 1995 Lebed retired from the Russian army with the rank of lieutenant general .

In 1996 he ran for the presidential election and came third in the first ballot with 14.5% of the vote. In the second ballot, he called for the election of Boris Yeltsin , who had meanwhile appointed him Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation . In this capacity, he also negotiated the Khassavyurt peace agreement in August 1996, which ended the First Chechen War (for which he received the Hessian Peace Prize in 1998 ). Yeltsin released him in October 1996 after a dispute with Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov . In May 1998 Lebed was elected governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory . He held this office until he had a fatal accident in the crash of a Mi-8 helicopter .

Lebed was married and had three children (two sons, one daughter). The politician Alexej Lebed (1955–2019) was his brother.

literature

  • Alexander Lebed: Russia's way . Spiegel-Buchverlag, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-455-15015-2 .
  • In the bibliographic internet database RussGUS (freely accessible) over 60 references are offered for “Lebed” (search for subject notations under form search: 16.2.2 / Lebed *).

Web links

Commons : Alexander Lebed  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Риа Новости: Лебедь Александр Иванович. Биографическая справка. August 29, 2011. Retrieved December 25, 2017 (Russian).
  2. ^ Charles King: The Moldovans. Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford (CA) 2000, p. 200
  3. ↑ Риа Новости: Лебедь Александр Иванович. Биографическая справка. August 29, 2011. Retrieved December 25, 2017 (Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Lebed, Alexander Ivanovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lebed, Aleksandr Ivanovič; Лебедь, Александр Иванович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian politician and governor of Krasnoyarsk
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Novocherkassk
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 2002
Place of death Yermakovsky rajon