My Life and My Country

General Alexander Lebed is the most popular leader in Russia and its likely next president. Now, here is the brawling autobiography of this paratrooper, politician, peacemaker, and patriot. General Lebed's story takes readers from vodka-sodden arguments settled by teeth-rattling fisticuffs in Russian army barracks, to the chaos of the attempted coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin (in which Lebed took orders from both Yeltsin and the coup-minded military officers), to Russia's volatile present and its undetermined future. Here are Lebed's controversial thoughts on NATO expansion, Russia's political and economic relations with the United States and the West, and the outlook for Russian democracy and free-market reforms. The most important international political book of the year, General Alexander Lebed: My Life and My Country provides unparalleled insight into the likely leader of the nuclear power that covers one-sixth of the globe, that neighbors a resurgent China and a triumphant NATO, and that is confronting economic turmoil and multi-ethnic conflict.

This memoir--by the general brought in to enable Yeltsin to win the last election--is thoughtful and clear-eyed on military matters, but on politics it sounds like the officers' mess after midnight. The bulk of the book is devoted to Lebed's military career, and this makes much of it surprisingly good, particularly where he deals with Afghanistan. It is also characterized by a sardonic wit. He notes that he never heard the textbook order to ``charge'': ``In real battle, people are commanded chiefly through profanity.'' Referring to the muddy conditions, he writes that a ``bigger clod was a vehicle; a smaller clod was a man.'' Lebed is just to his enemies: The Afghans ``were warriors of the first order''; and when Colin Powell visited his division and Lebed was ordered by the minister of defense, over his protests, to conduct a parachute demonstration in dangerous conditions (as a result of which one paratrooper was killed and many injured), Lebed found ``unbearably shameful'' Powell's repeated question, ``What are you doing?'' He is disappointing on recent history, in part because of his outspoken contempt for politicians and democracy, and in part because he simply fails to deal with the events. He tells us almost nothing of his campaign for the presidency, or his negotiations with Yeltsin, or his successful peace talks with the Chechens. Too much of it is rhetoric rather than thought: ``Brother Slavs . . . in trading totalitarianism for democracy, haven't we just traded one bad thing for another?'' Nor are his suggestions persuasive: While noting that Russia is going through ``an economic, social, political, and moral crisis,'' he weakly suggests putting aside all arguments as to which system suits Russia best--socialism or capitalism--until better times. Lebed reveals himself to be an ``army hard-ass'' who is actually sensitive on army matters and only asinine on political ones. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Whether or not Lebed, the subject of Benjamen Lambeth's The Warrior Who Would Rule Russia (LJ 1/97), becomes the next president of Russia, as some expect, he has provided a vivid and brutal account of life in the Soviet military, from which he retired in 1996 to go into politics. While Lebed is best known for having negotiated a peace settlement in Chechnya while a member of Yeltsin's government, he focuses here on his career as an officer in the airborne troops, which took him to Afghanistan in 1981-82 and put him on the front lines of the 1988 ethnic disturbances in Azerbaijan and the defense of the Russian white house during the 1991 putsch. In contrast to Lebed's artless but readable autobiography, Gorbachev's Memoirs (LJ 9/15/96) of the same events seem so out of touch as to belong to another world. For informed readers and specialists in Soviet and military history.?Robert Decker, Palo Alto, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.