TIRASPOL, Moldova -- Brusque, even coarse and perpetually scowling, Alexander Lebed is on his way to becoming a popular hero in Russia: a rough-and-ready lieutenant general who speaks his mind but who kept his troops out of war.
Last week, Russians began to talk seriously about him as a candidate for president.
General Lebed is on the periphery of the Russian world -- in Moldova, a small country far from Moscow. He commands an army that stayed behind when the Soviet Union broke up, and he used that army in 1992 to smother a nasty little war of secession.
Moldova is a backwater, yet this ambitious military man refuses to leave it because he has found it to be a place where he can speak with impunity.
He dared to say in an interview that his boss, Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, the defense minister, had made himself a "laughingstock" for promising to capture Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in a few hours, the task that has taken the army months.
He claims President Boris N. Yeltsin has surrounded himself with "a pack of jackal-like officials," advisers telling him only what he wanted to hear.
He is a sharp critic of the war against Chechnya, both in its conception and its conduct: "Trying to preserve its territorial integrity with Chechnya, Russia might in the end lose the whole Caucasus -- and only after having spilled so much blood, having thrown the country back for decades, having completely destroyed its already half-dead economy. Yes, so much can be achieved by war."
At the same time, he talks admiringly about how Gen. Augusto Pinochet brought order to Chile by assuming dictatorial power after leading a bloody coup, even if the coup cost several thousand lives.
"So what?" says General Lebed. "Here, they kill more people than that in just one day."
This is the kind of talk that Russians find almost reassuring. And, significantly, it appeals to people across the political spectrum.
Nationalists see the general as standing up for the honor of Russia and the army. Liberals see him as delivering some levelheaded talk about the folly of war.
He says he's only a military man. But he does not conceal his ambitiousness. Two weeks ago he was quoted by a Moldovan newspaper as saying that President Yeltsin should resign. The next day he denied ever having said so.
A few days ago, an aide was quoted as saying the general would consider running for president next year. The next day General Lebed denied he was interested.
"A general has to be ambitious," he says. "The army doesn't need people who are content to finish their careers as captains. The army needs feisty, impudent, purposeful people."
He runs a tight ship in Tiraspol. Every tree on the military base is whitewashed to precisely the same height. Cars are shiny. On any given day, all the men are wearing identical uniforms -- quite an achievement for a Russian army unit.
The 14th Army, which he commands, has dwindled to a force of just several thousand men. In public, they speak reverentially of their commander.
In private, it is no different. He came here in July 1992, the moment when Russian-speaking separatists were defying the Moldovan government in Chisinau, the capital.
General Lebed used his artillery to repulse a Moldovan attack, which led the Moldovan authorities to declare that they were effectively at war with Russia. But in fact that was the end of the fighting.
Since then General Lebed has come to despise the civilian leaders of the breakaway territory, and the 14th Army has sat in undisturbed neutrality in Tiraspol, preventing either side from losing its head.
nTC Moscow is now brokering a deal between the factions; the only drawback, from General Lebed's point of view, is that it calls for the eventual withdrawal of his army.
But he may be about ready to play on a bigger stage.
The contrast between his army, with its order and sense of purpose, and the units that blasted and blundered their way into Chechnya this winter would have brought General Lebed to Russia's attention even if his outspokenness had not.
And he has all the right credentials. He fought honorably in
Afghanistan, alongside General Grachev. He stood alongside Mr. Yeltsin in resisting the coup of 1991.
He says now that if he had received an order to attack the Russian president he would have obeyed, but since the order never came, he was free to make his own decision. His loyalty at that key moment is apparently what allows him to speak his mind and hold onto his job.
Even more important is that he has no obvious links to politicians of Soviet or more recent Russian past.
A Tiraspol woman, Lyudmila Prozorova, gave a typical assessment of the general when asked her opinion of him: She offered a two-word phrase -- "Molodets muzhik!" -- that might loosely be translated as, "He's salt of the earth, and good for him!"
The only question is this: Is he fit to run anything larger than a colonial army base?
A lot of people think so, including two reform-minded members of Parliament, Konstantin Zatulin and Sergei Glazyev, who have talked to him about joining a centrist faction they are in the process of creating.
But Maj. Gen. Valery Yevnevich, the commander of President Yeltsin's favorite army unit, the Tamansky Motorized Division, was able to restrain his enthusiasm for his colleague during a recent visit to the Tamansky base outside Moscow.
"I don't know what Lebed's doing," he says. "It's you journalists who create an image. He's what you're creating.
"Look at these soldiers," the general says, pointing to squads of young, dazed-looking draftees. "What's Lebed to them?"
To those who know him, the 14th Army commander comes across as a strong, quiet leader. He has large hands, a face that by his own account is noticeably unattractive, and a voice that seems to run as deep as the Volga River.
Some of his ideas are anything but clear. He says his experience of ethnic conflict in Moldova has convinced him that borders should be "erased." He is remarkably vague in describing who would run things if the former Soviet republics erased their borders -- but he seems to favor a resurgent Russia.
He said he believes there is no such thing as socialism or capitalism, "only objective economic laws."
He says, again, that he isn't now running for president.
"But unfortunately all problems now become political ones. We were all brought up in a lie. There were mountains of lies. And now they still go on with it from force of inertia," he says.
The general gives every sign of waiting to be called upon. He is making a show of not playing at intrigue. "If you want blunt," he seems to be saying, "I'm your man."
"Nothing is impossible here," he says. "We are falling into an abyss, and we are getting closer and closer to the bottom. . . . We have to grab at something to save ourselves."