RUSSIA'S SECURITY CHIEF FIRED : YELTSIN SAYS LEBED HURT `TEAM'.

Byline: Michael Specter The New York Times

Four months after publicly embracing him as a political heir, President Boris N. Yeltsin angrily appeared on national television Thursday night and dismissed Alexander Lebed, his frank and aggressive national security chief.

Looking frail but determined in his first prolonged television appearance in weeks, Yeltsin told the stunned citizens of Russia that he no longer could tolerate the brazen and insubordinate behavior of the 46-year-old former army general.

``I am compelled to relieve General Lebed of his duties as secretary of the Security Council,'' he said, clearly enraged.

An assistant then produced a document - the decree dismissing Lebed - that the president signed with an exaggerated flourish.

Yeltsin's risky decision to distance himself from the man who almost by himself has managed to bring the ruinous war in Chechnya to a halt, and who, polls show, is Russia's most popular politician, had become almost inevitable in recent weeks. Lebed has clashed frequently and publicly with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and with the presidential chief of staff, Anatoly Chubais, with whom he had been running the country in the absence of the ailing president.

``There has to be a united team'' to govern the country, the president said in his address Thursday night. ``The team should pull together, work like a fist. But now we have a situation where Lebed is splitting the team apart. That is totally unacceptable.''

The effect of the dismissal on Russian politics will depend largely on the president's health. If Yeltsin manages to survive - he is awaiting heart bypass surgery and has not functioned fully as president since his re-election in July - Lebed may fade into the fiery past. But if there are elections before 2000, when Yeltsin's term would end, Lebed can only benefit from having become an enemy of an unpopular administration.

The implications for the country's painful, unresolved relationship with its mutinous southern republic, Chechnya, are even less clear. Lebed was the first Russian leader with the power to stop the Russian army's assaults on Grozny, the Chechen capital, and he was the only man able to convince Chechen separatists to put down their guns. Without him in the government, the fragile peace he managed to build there could easily unravel.

The day began ominously in the Kremlin, when Chernomyrdin called an emergency meeting of his senior ministers, including Lebed, and sided publicly with Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov, who said Wednesday that Lebed seemed to be trying to create his own private army. The prime minister accused Lebed of possessing a ``Napoleon complex,'' though he belittled suggestions that Lebed had been planning a coup or public revolt.

On Thursday night, there was no indication that the army, which has long been loyal to Lebed and is suffering from a severe lack of resources, had any plans to challenge the government.

Kulikov had charged that Lebed was planning to use a new elite group as a private army to stage a coup. It was a preposterous charge from one of Lebed's most hated enemies, a man who has repeatedly referred to the peace settlement in Chechnya as ``high treason.'' Lebed denied the accusation Thursday.

Lebed himself suggested Thursday night that he was more committed to taking an immediate vacation than to any brash course of action. But he also made it clear that his presidential ambitions had not dimmed.

``I call on my comrades in arms, my allies, and people who I probably do not know,'' Lebed said at a news conference Thursday night. ``Do not do anything abrupt. We will act, but we will act only using constitutional means.'' He said he would begin political activities at once. Unable, however, to avoid dropping at least one dark warning, Lebed said the country could face a ``hot autumn'' because of the deep distress of the underpaid and demoralized army.

Lebed did not mince words about Yeltsin, calling him an ``aged and sick man.'' He said he was too ``well brought up'' to publicly attack a man so enfeebled, but added that he held Yeltsin responsible for the problems in the country, ``because he did not pass his duties on to anyone.''

In the short term, Lebed may gain much support from his dismissal. The Russian people, while extremely weary of politics and elections, are always attracted to leaders who have been sacrificed by their bosses. Yeltsin knows that better than anyone, because he was in the same position in 1988, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev purged him from the ruling elite of the Communist Party. This act cemented his popularity with the type of average voters who now say they support Lebed.

That puts Lebed in an unusual position: He can now say that he has government experience and that he stopped a vicious war (and if it starts again in his absence he can make even more of his peace efforts). He can attack the economic program of Chernomyrdin and Chubais: He detests them both, and feels they have helped create a climate where cronyism and corruption are as common as capitalism and commerce. And he can rail against the Kremlin - always good for scoring points - while reminding voters that he has been there, served time, and learned important lessons. But if Yeltsin survives and prospers after surgery the president may have plenty of time to find yet another heir apparent, a man like Yuri Luzkhov, perhaps, the mayor of Moscow.

``If Yeltsin dies and there are early elections, Lebed really can't lose if they are fair,'' said Andrei Piontkowsky, director of Moscow's Center for Strategic Studies, a liberal research group. ``But if the elections are in four years he has his work cut out for him. He is very famous today, but he could be gone tomorrow.''

It may have seemed a bizarre time to roil the waters in Russia. With a sick president and no clear line of succession it can only raise new questions about the future stability of the country. But Yeltsin has always been known for his uncanny intuition.

It was intuition, and a good sense of survival, that permitted him to take Lebed into his administration in the first place. Lebed came in a surprisingly strong third in the first round of this year's presidential elections and his appeal was obvious among voters that Yeltsin needed populists and nationalists who could not permit themselves to return to communism.

But Yeltsin is a man for whom loyalty has strange meanings. Last December, after Chernomyrdin's political party was humiliated at the polls in parliamentary elections, the president dismissed Chubais, who was then in charge of Russia's huge and badly corrupt privatization program, and said publicly that he had cost the government the election.

Today, Chubais is Yeltsin's closest aide. Lebed, on the other hand, never gave the president the type of unconditional support that world leaders expect from their subordinates. He acted as if the government was a coalition and that he was an equal member. Asked if he intended to become president in 2000, he replied instantly: ``Yes, if not sooner.'' He said publicly that he thought Yeltsin had stayed beyond the period of his usefulness, and privately he made fun of his weak health and love of liquor.

He was effective, and particularly so in Chechnya, where he became the first senior Russian leader to admit what was obvious to anyone who had been in the region: The Russian army was getting destroyed by dedicated Muslim guerrillas. As a paratroop commander in Afghanistan, he had seen it all before, and he vowed to stop it at once.

``One man cannot be responsible for peace in Chechnya,'' Chernomyrdin said Thursday, promising as he has often in the past that peace was important to him. ``There will be twists and turns. The role of Lebed in ending that crisis is not simple. He carried out a certain course set by the president.''

Few people believe that, in part because the president refused to speak with Lebed during the weeks in August and early September when he was negotiating the terms of the treaties that have been signed and largely enforced in the war zone.

Career highlights of Alexander Lebed

Key dates during the career of Alexander Lebed, Russia's national security chief who was ousted Thursday:

1973 - Takes command of paratrooper unit at age 23.

1980-82 - Commands Russian battalion fighting in Afghanistan.

1985-89 - Rises from regiment commander of paratrooper division to division commander of the elite Tula division.

1991 - Ignores order to surround Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin's Moscow stronghold during hard-liners' coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Says it wasn't a stand for democracy, but that he couldn't kill Russians.

1992-94 - Commands Russian troops in Moldova's breakaway region of Trans-Dniester, scene of ethnic conflict between the Moldovan government and mainly Slav separatists. Widely praised for ending the bloodshed.

1994 - Quits military over conflict with Defense Minister Pavel Grachev.

December 1995 - Elected to the State Duma, lower house of parliament.

June 1996 - Finishes strong third in presidential elections; joins Yeltsin's team as head of Security Council.

August 1996 - Signs agreements with Chechen separatist leaders ending 20 months of fighting in the breakaway republic. Accord is publicly praised but meets with resistance from some top Russian politicians who say it will cause Russia to lose Chechnya.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, box

(1 -- color) Yeltsin

(2 -- color) Lebed

Box: Career highlights of Alexander Lebed (see text)