“The situation in Krasnoyarsk,” opined Communist Party (CPRF) boss Gennadi Zyuganov, “is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930’s.” Fascism, claimed the national Bolshevik boss, who should know a thing or two about the subject, is threatening Russia, incubating in a Siberian womb. He was not alone in making such dubious charges. In fact, in the days leading up to the April 26 gubernatorial election in Krasnoyarsk Kray, a vast, mineral-rich region stretching from the Arctic to the Chinese border, a flock of the Moscow political and financial elite’s leading songbirds descended on the unsuspecting—and long-suffering—inhabitants of the kray, chirping their praises of the well-connected incumbent, Valeri Zubov (local representative of what Russians call the “party of power”), and damning his opponent, a much-decorated former general of Airborne Troops, Aleksandr Lebed. The flock included Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov who, as the boss-in-chief of Russia’s equivalent of Tammany Hall, sees Lebed as an “extremist.” Luzhkov intends to poach on Lebed’s populist-nationalist electoral field come the presidential elections in 2000, and he will be one of the big losers if the Lebed juggernaut continues to roll in the direction of Moscow.

At times it seemed as if Zubov had turned over the campaign to the folks who really run things and who appear to be hysterical at the prospect of Lebed using a Krasnoyarsk base to launch a political assault on the Kremlin. They should be: Lebed carried the May 17 run-off in Krasnoyarsk by nearly 20 percent, blowing Zubov away by a count of 57 percent to 38 percent, in spite of a seemingly endless barrage of anti-Lebed propaganda and not-so-veiled threats that Moscow would do its best to “suffocate” the region, as one wag put it, should the proles disobey the ukase of Boris I, otherwise known as the “Father of Russian Democracy.” Every elite-delivered smear only appeared to help Lebed.

Readers of Chronicles already know the general. Lebed looks like the real McCoy, an honest, straight-talking man of the people with a voice as deep as Lake Baikal, a build like a gladiator (Lebed once pounded his foes in the ring as a heavyweight boxer), and a mug like a Slavic Jack Palance. His commanding presence, reputation for integrity, and willingness to take personal responsibility for seemingly impossible tasks (the word in Moscow is that Yeltsin gave Lebed, then secretary of the Russian Security Council, the nod to negotiate an end to the Chechen War in 1996 hoping that he would fail; he didn’t, thus, he had to go) is often judged by Russians as evidence that Lebed is krutiy—a word that denotes a special quality of persistence and toughness. Campaigning among the people—his people—Lebed is in his element, mixing easily with workers, peasants, soldiers, and priests. “Siberians are different from other Russians, says Lebed. “Serfdom never existed here,” thus there is a special sense of “freedom and endurance” to the Siberians.

It will be good ground for the kind of experiment Lebed wants to conduct. His campaign is a run against Moscow and the political-financial oligarchy that runs it. In the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament consisting of regional governors, Lebed intends to launch a direct assault on the capital: he plans to propose that enterprises pay their taxes not in Moscow, where most have their headquarters and, by Russian law, pay taxes, but in the region they operate in. This would strip Luzhkov of a lucrative source of funds to pilfer and could shift the locus of trade and investment (85 percent of much-needed foreign investment in Russia now goes to the “center,” Moscow) to the hinterlands. Lebed further proposes to cut taxes for Russian producers, thus hoping to tap into the vast gray economy, and to guarantee investors’ rights as a means of attracting productive investment in the provinces. He is for a Slavic Union of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, the protection of Russian minorities in the “near abroad” (meaning the former Soviet republics), self-government at the local and regional level, a prominent role for the Russian Orthodox Church in public life, the protection of strategically important Russian industries, and against messianic military adventurism or efforts to resurrect the U.S.S.R. In short, “fascism” as defined for us by the powersthat- be (remember Pat Buchanan’s 1996 campaign?). He is therefore hated by both the “patriots,” the communist-nationalist pseudo-opposition dominated by the CPRF and Zhirinovsky, bought off long ago by the Yeltsin regime, and Moscow’s tea-sipping (Lebed’s supporters —though not the general himself, who does not imbibe—slam down vodka in blender-sized glasses) “democrats,” the Russian equivalent of the West’s proponents of a “democratic capitalism” that is of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite.

I have a theory as to why the likes of Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed so curdle the stomachs of the New World Order crowd, even if they can’t deny that what he says doesn’t sound threatening. First, it is plain to see that he is not one of them. Lebed does not don the obligatory Italian-imported threads of the globalist nomenklatura, nor has he consulted a hairdresser lately. He is the strong silent type, prone to answering questions with a direct “yes” or “no” or with the homespun wisdom of the Russian peasant aphorism. Second, he is scary looking. To the steers of the NWO corral, a bull is scary stuff. Lebed is a man’s man, a man without pretension or bravado who, to the credit of Russian womanhood, is deemed attractive by the fair sex of the Slavic world precisely because he is a man who keeps his word, fights his own battles, and does not whine or bellyache. He is a combat veteran, a sportsman, the faithful husband of a wife he married young, a father of three grown children, and a grandfather four times over at age 48. The thing that the geldings of the brave new world hate the most about Lebed is that he reminds them of their lost virility.