Jews in Siberia Split over Bid by Former General to Win Office

A nationalist’s victory in recent regional elections highlights the complexity of Jewish issues in contemporary Russian politics.

Alexander Lebed, a retired general and former security adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, kept his presidential hopes alive by taking a surprising lead in the first round of voting for governor of Krasnoyarsk, a region in Siberia.

Lebed, who had been trailing in the opinion polls, received 45 percent of the vote. Incumbent Governor Valery Zubov received 35 percent and will face Lebed in a runoff election scheduled for May 17.

Lebed, 48, has said he wants to become governor to gain a powerful launching pad for his bid for national office. A failure to win this post would virtually eliminate him from the presidential picture — an occurrence that would relieve the Kremlin, which is anxiously looking at the Krasnoyarsk race.

Observers believe Lebed could win the nationalist vote in the next presidential election, which is slated for the year 2000.

In 1996, Lebed finished a strong third on a law-and-order ticket in the first round of the presidential election. Most observers agree that Yeltsin won in the second round because some of Lebed’s 15-million supporters voted for Yeltsin, answering the retired general’s call to do so.

Only the top two vote-getters were allowed to run in the second round.

The Krasnoyarsk region, stretching from the Arctic to the Mongolian border, is one-fourth the size of the United States and is rich in natural resources and industry.

Meanwhile, most of the 5,000 Jews in the region support Zubov.

“The Jewish community maintains good relations with the administration,” Yakov Bril, a community leader, said in a telephone interview. According to Bril, Zubov has attended Jewish celebrations held at a local synagogue — a rare show of support for the Jewish community by a Russian governor.

Vladimir Goussinsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, has reportedly told friends that he would consider leaving the country if Lebed were ever elected president.

At the same time, the local media — which is controlled by Krasnoyarsk authorities — employed anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric in an attempt to turn voters against Lebed, who is supported by influential tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

One week before the Krasnoyarsk election, Berezovsky, who is Jewish, announced that he is supporting Lebed’s gubernatorial bid in order to present a viable opponent to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who is also expected to be a candidate in the presidential elections.

Lebed received favorable coverage on national ORT television, which is partially owned by Berezovsky.

But in an interview with Newsweek magazine earlier this year, Berezovsky said Lebed could turn out to be “another de Gaulle, another Pinochet or another Hitler.”

Meanwhile, Russian President Boris Yeltsin has sent a message of support to one of Russia’s most extremist parties. The congratulatory letter was read at the congress of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was instrumental in securing victory for Yeltsin’s premiership candidate in the Russian Parliament’s lower house last Friday.

Yeltsin’s message, which was a rare show of presidential support to Russia’s most famous ultranationalist, said Zhirinovsky’s party “has played a significant part in the establishment of political pluralism and a truly multiparty system in Russia.”

The leader of the Liberal Democrat Party has gained notoriety for his support of racism, anti-Semitism and Russian chauvinism and has close links with extremist and neo-fascist parties in other countries.

Zhirinovsky’s party voted in favor of Sergei Kiriyenko’s nomination for prime minister in the third and final vote in the Russian Parliament’s lower house last Friday.