MOSCOW — Alexander Lebed, the gruff former general who helped defeat the 1991 hard-line Soviet coup, stave off a Communist challenge to Russian President Boris Yeltsin five years later and end the 1994-96 war in Chechnya, was killed Sunday in a helicopter crash. He was 52.
Lebed was fatally injured when the Mi-8 helicopter he was riding hit a power line and crashed in foul weather in Krasnoyarsk, the austere and gargantuan Siberian region he had governed since 1998. At least seven others aboard were killed.
Lebed was as complex and contradictory as his country: a warrior praised for peacemaking, who once sneered at democracy but later lauded generals who embraced it — such as Dwight Eisenhower — and a tough guy whose graceful surname means swan.
A paratrooper with a pugilist's face, he was widely admired by Russians for his patriotism and for his no-nonsense remarks, delivered in a bass voice so deep it seemed to come from the earth below him.
"He who laughs last is the one who shot first" was characteristic of the remarks that charmed many and chilled others.
Lebed was born in the blue-collar southern city of Novocherkassk on April 20, 1950. In 1962, he saw troops shoot striking laborers there. His father had been incarcerated in Josef Stalin's prison camps for being late for work.
Lebed entered a paratroopers' academy in 1969 and was a battalion commander in 1981-82 during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where he won a top medal. In 1990, he reached the rank of major-general.
During the August 1991 hard-line coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, coup leaders ordered Lebed's troops to surround the Moscow stronghold where Yeltsin, the Russian president, was defying the coup. But Lebed refused to send in his forces.
Praised by reformers when the coup collapsed, speeding the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lebed quickly disappointed his admirers, saying that he "could not care less for democracy," but also could not bring himself to kill Russians.
Later, when running for the Krasnoyarsk governorship, he answered critics who portrayed him as an incipient dictator by saying his heroes were Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle, military men who became democratic leaders.
Boris Nemtsov, leader of the liberal Union of Right Forces party, said on Ekho Moskvy radio after Lebed's death that he had governed Krasnoyarsk democratically, allowed an active opposition and steered clear of the corruption endemic in Russian politics.
Lebed is survived by his wife, Inna, and three children, Alexander, Yekaterina and Ivan, as well as five grandchildren.