Although Lebed came in at a surprisingly strong third place in the first-round of the election, his failure to finish in the top two disqualified him from the second round.
[2] Yeltsin's victory, which surprised Western analysts,[3] paved the way for his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, to rise to power.
Since he was among the military figures most popularly liked amongst the Russian public, Lebed had been speculated as a potentially strong presidential candidate since as early as 1994.
[13] Lebed also ran as the nominee of a new party he founded named Honor and Motherland which he built as a campaign organization separate from KRO.
[12] Up until early May, Lebed entertained negotiations with Grigory Yavlinsky and Svyatoslav Fyodorov to jointly form a third force coalition.
For instance, in the city of Perm his campaign's field office operated out of a cubicle-sized space and was headed by a retired military major with no political experience.
This was done as part of an effort by Yeltsin's camp to promote Lebed in the hopes that he would syphon off votes from other nationalist candidates in the first-round.
[8] Lebed alleged that the west was "attempting to turn Russia into a cheap supplier of raw materials, a reservoir of free labor, and a huge hazardous waste dump for the industrial world.
[9] In the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lebed was involved in military efforts to suppress ethnic unrest.
This included, in the spring of 1989, an effort to quash unrest in Georgia in which more than twenty people were killed and dozens wounded when spetsnaz troops commanded by Lebed used sapper shovels and chemical weapons on crowds.