HOLY MOTHER RUSSIA

One thing the reader can’t fail to learn from this remarkable autobiography by former Russian Major General Alexander Lebed is that military life in the Soviet Union was a school of very hard knocks.

Lebed tells some hard-knock stories from even before he joined the Red Army. At fourteen, he had a broken collarbone so badly set that (rather than live with one arm two inches shorter than the other) he had the bone surgically rebroken and recast: “It was while I was recovering that I decided to be a military aviator — so I’d have to stand the pain,” he writes, almost gleefully. “And stand it I did.” At sixteen, he broke his nose in a fistfight, and looking back on the incident, he comments, “I was no girl. I knew a man needed to be only slightly better looking than an ape, and that a man’s true worth isn’t defined by the prettiness of his face.”

But once he entered the military, the knocks started in earnest. Denied entry into pilot school, Lebed opted for airborne training. On his first parachute jump he landed on his tailbone, seriously damaging his back and severing tendons in his arm. A few years later, after he injured his hand, his smashed and dislocated fingers were set without anesthetic by a drunken physician whose sense of orthopedic accuracy was apparently acquired by carefully observing the pain he evoked in his patients.

He could dish the knocks out as well as take them. A major in Afghanistan in 1981 and 1982, Lebed found himself commanding troops who seemed to spend much of their spare time, such as it was, beating each other up: “Broken noses, cracked jaws and black eyes became the norm.” After ten Soviet soldiers tortured another by rigging his body parts to the electric crank of a field telephone, Lebed lined them up and, one by one, smashed them to the floor with his fists. A few pages before he relates this incident, Lebed declares that “an officer should never let his fists do the talking.” And in fact, he tells us, his conscience did bother him a little: “My long-held theories of how to handle men had fallen apart in practice,” he says ruefully. But then he adds: “But the next morning, there was not one black eye. The fighting had stopped. I was no longer a softy.”

Born in 1950 and an officer cadet in the airborne by age twenty, Lebed is probably the best sort of man we have any right to expect the Soviet military machine to create. Pugnacious, very tough, but imbued apparently with a strong sense of fairness and human dignity, he was popular with his troops (working hard to improve their often desperate living conditions) and he climbed the Soviet officer ladder in the face of wrenching corruption and mismanagement.

But it was only in Afghanistan that the corruption and incompetence finally came to disgust him. “No one ever saw the children of high-ranking Soviet officials in uniform in Afghanistan,” he writes, and as for the senior commanders, they “were all slippery characters.” “Afghanistan can mean anything you like,” Lebed writes, “but not shame. It was the politicians who made the decisions: some wise, others less so; some expedient, others not. For the unwise decisions, soldiers paid with their blood.”

If “Afghanistan” were replaced by “Vietnam,” this anguished reflection on a mismanaged war could have come from scores, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. army officers. But the resemblance ends there, for what Lebed faced in the late 1980s was the collapse of his national government’s power at home and the decay of the Kremlin’s influence on the peripheries of the Soviet empire. From Tbilisi in 1989 to Baku in 1990, Lebed commanded elite units called in by a desperate politburo in Moscow to suppress almost infinite varieties of ethnic and ideological separatism. In Baku, he coolly drew his pistol in front of an arrogant Azeri city apparatchik who had deliberately turned the electricity off in an Armenian sector of the city. “Can you fly?” Lebed demanded; “If I threw you off the balcony right now, would you fly up or down?” The electricity was swiftly restored.

Rather oddly, Lebed’s book omits an account of his role in quelling Romanian ethnic separatism in the predominantly Russian Transdniester area of the Moldovan Republic in 1992. “I would either have to write about it in detail or not write about it at all,” he says distantly, claiming deep disappointment at the way the “scoundrels at home” (probable translation: Boris Yeltsin) undermined his generally successful efforts to restore peace and civil confidence to the region, especially to the ethnic Russians living there.

Lebed does, however, give a fascinating and highly detailed account of his role in the tense siege of the Russian White House in August 1991, when Gorbachev was held momentarily under arrest in the Crimea. By Lebed’s own acknowledgment, he was ambivalent about the events as they unfolded. Ordered by superior officers to draw up assault plans to take over the Russian parliamentary building that Boris Yeltsin was defiantly using as the resistance headquarters, Lebed swiftly did so. He was, after all, obeying orders. But as the coup began to fall apart, the command to assault the White House was never given, and Lebed, who had met with Yeltsin and spoken charmingly to the anti-coup leaders, became an instant hero to Yeltsin’s supporters. But he did not return the affection: It was not “democracy” he had been defending, he told disappointed journalists in his gravelly voice a few days later, it was “common sense.”

Lebed’s contempt for “democrats” rings through his autobiography like a ceaseless bell. Beneath it is a plaintive longing for a return to the days when to be a Russian was to belong to a nation that was feared and respected around the world. He comments pithily on the USSR, “those who do not regret its disintegration have no heart, and those who think it can be restored in its original form have no brains.” Then he explains why: “There is something to regret: there is a big difference between being a citizen of a Great Power, with many shortcomings, and being the citizen of an emaciated ‘developing’ country.” My Life and My Country, his autobiography’s title in English, is revealingly different from the original title in Russian: Za derzhavu obidno. A paraphrased translation might be: “A feeling of shame for the plight of a great power.”

The last three chapters of Lebed’s book depart strikingly from the colorful and sometimes witty tale of his rise from cadet to major general in the Soviet army, leaving the surmise that another hand may have written it, albeit with Lebed’s approval. The last forty-six pages of the book lash at the various forces he believes responsible for Russia’s catastrophic decline: “the legions of nouveaux riches” and the “democratic nomenklatura” (translation: Yeltsin, Anatoly Chubais, and their ilk). “Some say that Western culture is a threat to Russian traditions,” Lebed adds, “and I believe that is true.” His country, he growls, has become “a refuse pit for low-grade Western art; action movies where thirty or forty people are killed in a variety of ways, or pornography, or other mass-produced, formulaic rubbish on television.”

Lebed insists that he is not against capitalism, only the oligarchs who in Russia have deprived it of “its most attractive side — free competition.” If he came to power, he insists, he would not try to restore a unitary, imperial- style state, but he would restore order. “Order does not mean dictatorship, or heavy-handed, arbitrary rule,” he insists, simply “strict obedience to the law by all, and I mean all citizens.” Above all, he says he wants to stop what he considers the continuing destruction of the Russian state and initiate nothing less than a genuine revival of the Russian nation. “I am convinced that sooner or later, with or without help from the West, Russia will revive,” he says.

At the top of Lebed’s list of what will restore the “national core” are ” nationalism and Orthodoxy” (two of the ideological planks that, together with “autocracy,” defined the czarist system at its most reactionary). For Lebed, there is an almost mystical connection among the Russian Orthodox Church, the army, and national grandeur. “The Church strengthens the army,” he explains, ” the army defends the Church. And on this restored spiritual axis — the two forces of great power — we can begin to feel like Russians again.”

This presumably is the reason Lebed proposes that Russia, to the accompaniment of church bells around the nation, simultaneously entomb in Red Square Nicholas II (Russia’s last czar, murdered by the Bolsheviks) and Lenin (the Bolshevik leader who gave the order for the murder).

Both men, Lebed asserts, “knew earthly glory, honor, and greatness,” and the melding of the two parts of Russia’s modern historical heritage, Lebed believes, would “restore the link between our present and our past, and the historical succession of generations.”

It’s too early to say whether this is sincere mystical mumbo-jumbo or merely a canny appeal to the atavistic national yearnings of the humiliated Russian people at the end of a century of suffering and exhaustion. But regardless, public-opinion polls repeatedly show Lebed as the single most popular individual in the entire Russian political landscape. Russian politics in the post-Communist era is notoriously unpredictable, but Lebed is surely right that sooner or later Russia will revive — and to read Lebed’s autobiography is to remember that it may not be in a form attractive to those who have grown comfortable with a Russia that is chaotic, shuffling, and no threat.

David Aikman is a veteran foreign correspondent.