The star and death of the commander

The tragic death of Alexander Lebed responds with a sudden pain. This is a strange nostalgic feeling. Longing for times when people still committed actions. When the politicians were large. The general stood out even against their background.

It was an unusually bright, fantastically gifted person. Connecting the mind and simple -mindedness, determination and confusion, who knew how to fight and fed hatred for war. Surviving his time, his triumph, his victories. The historical figure has become during his lifetime - both in the usual and in the Gogol's sense of the word ...

His main merit is Khasavyurt.

It will take a lot of time before the descendants realize what a success for Russia this unexpected world was. What a chance went to both peoples - both Russian and Chechen. And how Russia and Ichkeria were indistinctly missed. And as Swan himself, having trampled the war, did not manage to dignily finish his role as a political figure in the scale of de Gaulle.

Nature, working on him, recognized inspiration ... This is never a visible face with a targeted look and a disarming smile. This amazing voice on thunder octaves. This juicy, accurate, brilliant Russian language, a mixture of easily appropriated by other people's aphorisms, personal philological exploits and a cheerful barracks joke, over which the white -raises are flooded than anyone else.

The swan was doomed to success, and success came to Swan. First, in August of the 91st, when he, without waiting for the order, did not take the White House. Then, in Transnistria, where Alexander Ivanovich first crushed the war, applying his corporate identity: intimidating it to death. And then there were elections, third place, the position of Secretary of the Council of Security and Assistant President for National Security.

It was a strange time: the swan hated the "hawks" and "Chekists" and loved a considerable part of the liberal public with fearful love. Although he, a combat general, went everywhere where we threw our indignant gaze: in Afghan, and in Baku, and in Tbilisi, and the White House in August would storm not hesitating if the classmate Grachev gave him such an order. But Brezhnev and Andropov were puffed up for Afghan, for Tbilisi - Rodionov, for Baku - Primakov. Alexander Ivanovich remained with a white swan - at first because he was indestructible, then for the simple reason that we peered into it.

The thing is that, unlike the “executioners”, he represented not a party, but an army, a military machine in its pure form, without ideological additives. It is easy to imagine in any uniform - American, French, British. By chance, the swan fought in Afghanistan, but he could - in Algeria, and in Vietanam, and in the Falklands. A soldier by profession, by education, in spirit, by belief, by fate, he, as it were, did not suck the court. As a talented author's creation, it existed according to the laws that the Creator himself ordered him.

The Swan star ascended in the mid-90s, in an atmosphere of the pitch mess, a parade of intra-Russian sovereignty and Chechen massacre. In the situation is so Akhova that even the Democrats were pricked about the "order". It’s not that about a pinch, but about a sane, young, preferably inaccurate policy, which measures of decisive and strict, but not encroaching on the democratic conquest of the current era, would somehow call on certain categories of citizens: thieves, bureaucrats, specific princes, brothers ... Talleyrans from the Kremlin administration, then they already began the general and began to gradually adapt for their purposes. He had the mind to go with them in a conjunction - to Hasavyurt itself. And the naive absurdity was enough to quarrel immediately after.

Actually, by the end of the 95th, when the swan took the first steps in politics, his portrait was completed. The will to power, powerful charisma, ferocious charm - everything remained with him, has not gone anywhere. But other features hidden for the time being were revealed. For example, his rare gift to produce enemies. Stronger than this gift, only talent to search and make friends ...

His best friends, as you know, visited the “decent person” of Skoks and “slandered Russian general” Korzhakov (characteristics of the swan). The first, by virtue of personal mediocrity, almost buried his career as a swan under the wreckage of the Congress of Russian communities. Demonstrative closeness with a retired bodyguard, in general, is not clear on what was based on, cost the swan of breaking up relationships with Yeltsin and the subsequent expulsion from the post of secretary of the Security Council.

Now in brief necrologists we read that Alexander Ivanovich considered Krasnoyarsk as a starting platform for the upcoming presidential spurt. He must have said so. But this does not mean that he thought so. The man is quite sober, Swan clearly understood that his star rolled up and the governor’s chair under the alert supervision of the Kremlin technologists - the last shelter. He could no longer cope with this: the population of the region was impoverished, and he had to beg money from Colonel Putin and listen to his fatherly instructions. After a failure elections, the local parliament has come to think even about the resignation.

Everything turned out completely different from him dreamed when he began such a glorious and easy campaign in politics from his Tiraspol bridgehead. Applause subsided. Jokes boring. The voice on thunder octaves became quiet, and the phrases are slurred. It was a fee for an early take -off, for a high flight, for the missed opportunities. Too bright and recognizable, it still stood out on a general gray background. But now it was only annoying.

On the day when his helicopter collapsed, lovers of political symbols could, sighing thoughtfully, notice: the board repeated the fate of the paratrooper. Getting lost in the fog, lost landmarks and crashed into the ground. But the Swan star continues to shine, and this light is Fire, as the personality and fate of the commander.