One of the most bizarre, expensive and hard-fought election campaigns in Russia's short democratic history came to an end in Siberia yesterday. Opponents of former Gen Alexander Lebed were looking for a miracle to prevent the man who believes destiny has chosen him to save Russia winning the governorship of the rich, strategic region of Krasnoyarsk.
Gen Lebed's crushing first round victory over the establishment-backed incumbent, Mr Valery Zubov, and the collapse of communist support, appeared to have set the 48-year-old airborne forces veteran up for a comfortable run-off win as votes were being counted last night.
More alarmingly for his rivals, it offers Gen Lebed the prospect of a secure rear base from which to launch his assault on the Kremlin in presidential elections in 2000. And it confirms a cardinal shift in the disaffected, anti-establishment vote away from extreme nationalists and traditional communists towards the neo-Gaullist solutions of patriots like Gen Lebed and the mayor of Moscow, Mr Yuri Luzhkov.
Gen Lebed - a southern Russian who has never lived in Siberia - fought an exhausting campaign the length and breadth of Krasnoyarsk territory, a region one-quarter the size of the United States, to overcome the suspicions of the tough, cynical electorate that he was carpetbagging on his way to the Kremlin.
Flying and driving from dawn till late at night around Krasnoyarsk's scattered communities, from the Arctic to the Mongolian marches, Gen Lebed worked the stump in countless Palaces of Culture and dusty public squares. Often stiff and awkward, sometimes aggressive with hecklers, his trademark double bass growl boosted by a portable speaker system, he was more earnest than inspirational.
"I'm made in such a way that when I take a decision to get involved in a fight, I don't think about defeat," he told reporters.
Behind the general's homely personal style was a group of powerful backers, including: the tycoon and CIS secretary, Mr Boris Berezovsky; media magnate, Mr Vladimir Gusinsky; and Mr Anatoly "The Ox" Bykov, reputedly one of the largest shareholders in Krasnoyarsk's scandal-plagued aluminium plant.
Mr Zubov, a quiet, apolitical academic, who relied heavily on the assumed support of a far-off President Boris Yeltsin to carry the day, struggled to fight back. Last week the ageing diva of Russia's campy Europop singing scene, Alla Pugachova, flounced grumpily into Siberia with a brief to give the incumbent some showbiz credibility.
Unfortunately, she revealed that she simply adored Gen Lebed. "Lebed is a bright star, just a wonderful person," she said.
Another attempt to damage the general backfired when fascists in camouflage fatigues, parading around Krasnoyarsk with pro-Lebed placards and emblems of a black swan ("Lebed" means "swan"), turned out to be bogus.
The general's reputation as an authoritarian, who values obedience rather than intelligence in subordinates, is both his weakness and his strength. He has yet to persuade the country's liberals that he is anything more than an ignorant, chauvinist martinet with an alarming choice of friends. The darkest cloud over him remains his alliance with Mr Yeltsin's disgraced former bodyguard, the unashamedly anti-democratic intriguer Mr Alexander Korzhakov.
Among his supporters, he is seen as a patriotic man of action, who did something to try to save the USSR and Russia rather than crying over it. A career army officer for 26 years, he has managed to define his Soviet tours in Afghanistan, the Caucasus and the Baltics as paradigms of selfless service to the motherland, of an honest soldier angrily but dutifully carrying out the orders of Politburo fools.
He won national gratitude in 1996 when as the president's security council secretary he extracted Russia from the unwinnable war in Chechnya, a concession to separatism he likes to compare to Charles de Gaulle's cutting of France's ties with Algeria.
But unlike de Gaulle and his other favourite generals, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Gen Lebed never took on a serious political task during his time in uniform - one that required the kind of back-room wheeler-dealing, alliance-forming, persuasion and the playing off of one group against another of which Mr Yeltsin remains the master.