That morning, Anatoly had voted – after much deliberation – and his choice was surprising. He could never support the communists, of course. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to vote for Boris Yeltsin either; not yet. He wanted to send a message: that freedom without discipline was anarchy. ““Yeltsin has tolerated corruption, even to the top,’’ he said. And so Anatoly, his wife, his mother and daughter all voted for Gen. Aleksandr Lebed. Their hope was that if Lebed did well, Yeltsin would have to acknowledge the general and his issues – the disgust with crime and corruption, the need for order. When the early returns showed Lebed running a strong third, Anatoly waved at the television. ““Perfect!’’ he said. ““Yeltsin must respond.''

It’s likely that Yeltsin had already responded. Hints had been dropped for days. Lebed had been allowed prominent, last- minute appearances on television and in the popular newspaper, Argumenty i Fakty. In his final campaign appearance, Yeltsin said, ““There is a need to prepare a future president… who is loved by all Russians.’’ And, as luck would have it, he’d found such a man. One of his opponents. He wouldn’t say who… until two days after the election, when the president and Lebed stood together in the Kremlin, partners now – a deal completed so quickly that it had to be precooked – and Yeltsin was asked if this was the man, the future president he’d been talking about. ““Yes,’’ he said.

So who is Lebed? ““A little bit of Ross Perot, a little bit of Colin Powell,’’ said Iosif Bakaleinik, the Harvard-educated manager of a tractor factory in the city of Vladimir. ““He’s the outsider, come to kick ass.’’ He has come from nowhere – from the 14th Russian Army in Moldova – in little more than a year, on the strength of two characteristics. The first is candor. Early on, he was a bit too candid. ““I am not a democrat,’’ he told NEWSWEEK in January 1995. He said his hero was Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who’d brought order and prosperity while killing only ““about 3,000 people.’’ He said the expansion of NATO would lead to World War III. He said Defense Minister Pavel Grachev was a prostitute. He has modified each of these (except for the last, and Grachev was sacked the day Lebed made his deal with Yeltsin). Now his heroes are Eisenhower and de Gaulle. And his gruff candor has ripened into a refreshing cleverness – and moderation. When the communist Gennady Zyuganov said he had no differences with Lebed, the general sent a scathing and rather hilarious response to the working-class newspaper Trud: ““Zyuganov divided [Soviet communists] into two parties… I have always thought there was only one party, built strictly on the [old Russian proverb], “I am the boss. You are the idiot’.''

Apparently, there was another party operating on that principle: the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), which Lebed joined after Grachev fired him from the military. The general entered politics an instant celebrity; by October, he led most public-opinion polls and many thought he would be Russia’s next president. But Yuri Skokov, a clever political barnacle, was the boss of KRO; Lebed served as podium filler, widely perceived to be an empty uniform. After KRO was crushed in December’s parliamentary elections, Lebed dumped Skokov, got a better haircut and began his slow climb back to respectability.

There are those who believe Lebed has found a new Skokov in Yeltsin. But where cynics suspect naivet (to put it kindly), many Russians see Lebed’s second defining quality: It has to do with his personal appearance, and not just the strength he conveys in his stubborn, supremely round, Russian face with the flattened pug’s nose, or the bass voice two octaves below humanly plausible. It is the sense of honor, of national pride that he radiates – qualities lost, and mourned, since the empire dissolved and the era of mafia democracy began. In 1994, a poll of fellow officers found Lebed the most admired general in the Russian Army. And last week, he appeared to take the country by storm. He was the talk of the open-air market in Vladimir (a city that almost always reflects national voting patterns). No one knew very much about him – beyond what they’d seen on television – but suddenly, half rather than 15 percent of the people were saying they’d voted for him. ““I wish I’d voted for him,’’ said a former factory worker named Galina. ““But now I can vote for him and Yeltsin together.''

The deftness of Yeltsin’s maneuver was more than breathtaking. It began to seem almost magical when, in the days after Lebed’s ascension, a parade of thugs – the worst of the usual suspects, those least likely to be dislodged – were evacuated from the president’s inner circle. Lebed claimed no credit for the purge; but he’ll receive it in the street. Indeed, if this were not Russia, the prevailing emotion could only be described as optimism (as it was, the sudden waning of pessimism threatened a national existential crisis). And my friend Anatoly, who’d helped precipitate the ““crisis’’ with his vote – he’d lost Ella, but was this, finally, how freedom sounded in Russian?