the tragedy of the kursk: crisis management in putin's russia1

Zoltan Barany

The Tragedy of the Kursk: Crisis Management in Putin’s Russia1

The individual is nonsense, the individual is zero.Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1921

Human life still costs nothing here.Leonid Radzikhovskii, 2000

THE SINKING OF THE NUCLEAR SUBMARINE KURSK ON 12 AUGUST 2000

– the first major accident of the Russian Navy since the end of theSoviet Union – is enlightening for students of contemporary Russiafor several reasons. First, predicaments of this sort tend to reveal theinstinctive reactions of political leaders to potential emergencies andafford a rare glimpse into how they manage subsequent crises. Inother words, the handling of this incident can help us understandRussia’s political elite in general and its head of state in particular.The tragedy of the Kursk was the first unrehearsed, unscripted, eventto test the country’s newly minted president, Vladimir V. Putin. It wasan opportunity for Putin to prove his mettle and for the world to takehis measure according to his response to the crisis.

Second, the accident also provided a chance to gauge whateverchanges might have taken place in the organizational behaviour andinstitutional culture of Russia’s armed forces. After operating in aquasi-democratic political framework for nearly a decade, what wouldbe the admirals’ reaction to the crisis, how would they share itsspecifics with the public and how would they fulfil their responsibil-ities? Finally, the disaster also presented a challenge for the Russianmedia and its overseers and an occasion to appraise journalisticfreedom in the country. In short, the sinking of the Kursk and, farmore so, the manner in which the ensuing crisis was managed by

© Government and Opposition Ltd 2004Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Texas A&M University (February2003) and at St Antony’s College, Oxford ( June 2003). I am grateful to these audiences and to the reviewers for their comments.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE KURSK 477

© Government and Opposition Ltd 2004

political and military elites and portrayed by the media, reveals agood deal about Russian politics and society.

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct both the Kursk inci-dent and especially the reaction to it by Russian military and politi-cal authorities. The question I am most interested in answering is,what does this critical case tell us about decision-making in contem-porary Russia? Needless to say, I am not suggesting that broad gen-eralizations can be based on the decision-making processes I amabout to examine. This article is about crisis management and itshould be recognized that the ways in which decisions are made inevents of this sort do not necessarily reveal much about the institu-tional dynamics and mechanics of decision-making pertaining tomore routine political and economic issues. Rather, the fundamen-tal argument of this study is that the way Russia’s new elites, bothpolitical and military, managed the tragedy did not differ significantlyfrom the manner in which Soviet leaders dealt with such crises – e.g.the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 – in the late Soviet period.The Kremlin’s handling of the October 2002 Moscow hostage crisislends further support to this contention.

I proceed as follows: after a brief account of the disaster, its causeand the initial rescue efforts, I examine the response of the politicaland military authorities with special attention to President Putin. In the following section I analyse the investigation, its findings andits recommendations. I continue by assessing the media’s record ofinforming the public about the crisis and its aftermath. Finally, I con-clude with some reflections of the lessons that could be learned fromthe sinking of the Kursk and the way the tragedy was handled.

THE ACCIDENT

On 10 August 2000 the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy com-menced its largest exercise in more than a decade. The scenario tobe played out was similar to those of Soviet-era manoeuvres, the endof the cold war and of the USSR notwithstanding: a clash betweentwo large naval groups with the participation of over 7,800 seamenand 22 submarines and warships – including the Piotr Velikii heavycruiser and the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.2 The exercise had

2 See Izvestia, 4 December 2001.

478 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION


several objectives. First, it was designed to be a show of muscle byRussia’s elite naval units. The admirals wanted to demonstrate theNavy’s capabilities and importance to President Putin especially inview of the on-going inter-service rivalry and power struggle amongthe top brass, and particularly between Defence Minister (DM) Mar-shall Igor Sergeev and Chief of the General Staff (CGS) AnatoliiKvashnin. The animosity between the two centred on their dis-agreement over spending priorities and, more broadly, on theirvision of Russia’s military stature. Sergeev, Yeltsin-appointee, was theadvocate of focusing defence spending on strategic and nuclearweapons. Kvashnin, on the other hand, is the champion of the mili-tary leaders’ narrow interests and has been a strong supporter ofboosting investment in conventional weapons. While Sergeev recog-nized the limited potential of the Russian armed forces, Kvashnin hasmaintained that, in order to protect its interests, Russia needs a largeand well-equipped military capable of waging war anywhere in theworld.

Second, political conservatives (and this category included mostof the armed forces elite) who still believed – especially in the after-math of the 1999 Kosovo war and NATO’s expansion to the east – inthe fundamental Western threat to Russia, intended to drive homethe point that the Navy had not lost its teeth. And third, the con-ventional purpose of manoeuvres of this magnitude was to teachnaval leaders the control of large formations, officers the manage-ment of their sailors and vessels, and crews the use of communica-tions and weapon systems. One of the war-game’s star participantswas the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, commissioned by theRussian navy in January 1996.

At around 7.30 a.m. GMT on Saturday 12 August, seismic moni-toring stations near and far detected two explosions 135 secondsapart in the vicinity of the Russian naval exercise. The blasts occurredaboard the Kursk, located approximately 140 kilometres off the Murmansk coast in the Barents Sea. The first detonation in the tor-pedo bay at the front of the submarine wrought serious damage andsparked an unquenchable fire; the second, 45 to 50 times larger withthe explosive power of nearly two tons of TNT, in effect demolishedthe submarine’s bow (front section).3 As a number of Russian andforeign experts immediately suggested, and the two-year long official

3 French Press Agency (AFP) (Moscow), 9 August 2001.



investigation eventually confirmed, the blasts and thus the sinking of the Kursk were caused by the spontaneous discharge of a practicetorpedo in the vessel’s first compartment.

The submarine’s entire crew of 118 perished. The first explosionkilled the personnel in the torpedo bay; the second, which rippedthrough the front of the ship, ended the life of most of the crew.There were 23 survivors who were either on duty in the ninth com-partment (at the rear) or managed to make their way there duringthe little over two minutes between the explosions. How long theystayed alive before they succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoninghas been the source of a major controversy – like much else sur-rounding the accident – in which opinions ranged from a fewminutes to many hours. Once the bodies were recovered forensicexperts found evidence suggesting that they may well have lived forup to five days.4

Admiral Viacheslav Popov, Commander of the Northern Fleet, wason the Piotr Velikii directing the manoeuvres. The warship was closeto the Kursk when it went down and recorded the blasts, yet Popovignored the signals, steered his ship away from the area, and ordereda search nine hours later. The Kursk was only located on the seabed31 hours after the explosions, in part because its emergency systems(including the buoy that was supposed to automatically surface incase of distress) failed to work. While Russian authorities refused toaccept any foreign aid, their rescue teams spent days in futileattempts to open the submarine’s escape hatch. Norwegian andBritish divers, who were permitted to take part in the rescue effortafter much delay, accomplished this task in a few hours, but for thoseaboard the Kursk it was already too late.

THE REACTION

A number of Russian and foreign publications have described theauthorities’ response to the Kursk crisis as ‘a massive cover-up’, liken-ing it to the official treatment of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster morethan fourteen years before. The days-long silence of the heads ofstate (it took Mikhail Gorbachev nine days to respond publicly toChernobyl; ‘only’ four for Putin to respond to the Kursk), the often

4 See www.gazeta.ru, 30 December 2002.



conflicting lies, the refusal of outside aid in the critical first days fol-lowing the accident, the fixation on secrecy, and the disregard forhuman life, all support this view.5

The Military Leadership

The Russian high command took more than two days before itannounced, on Monday 14 August, that the Kursk was in ‘serioustrouble’ and even then it deliberately misled the public by statingthat the accident occurred on Sunday, not on Saturday morning. (OnSunday, in fact, Admiral Popov told the media that the exercise hadbeen a resounding success and both sailors and their equipment hadperformed their functions flawlessly.) A torrent of intentional mis-information followed. The rumours, half-truths, and lies that theNavy employed to shift blame and dodge responsibility created falsehopes and obstructed rescue efforts.

The Navy leadership never revealed why the alarm was soundedonly twelve hours after the explosions on the Kursk were registeredby seismological and acoustic equipment and why it took 31 hoursto locate the submarine.6 Nor did it explain the reason for keepingthe accident a secret for over 50 hours. On 14 August naval author-ities admitted that the vessel ‘descended to the ocean floor’ (theword ‘sink’ was not to be used) but they insisted that the entire crewwas alive, that they were connected with them ‘with the help of pre-arranged signals’, and that ‘air and power are being pumped fromthe surface into the ship’.7 All of these statements were untrue.

Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, the Commander-in-Chief of theRussian Navy, repeatedly proclaimed that rescue workers did every-thing possible to save the submariners even though it was clear thatthey were ill-prepared and did not have access to the tools necessaryfor their mission. Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to thecontrary, Kuroyedov maintained in an interview a year after the

5 See, for instance, New York Times, 14 August 2000; Izvestia, 18 August 2000; Neza-visimaia Gazeta, 12–13 September 2000; Novie Izvestia, 24 July 2001; Tribuna, 4 October2001; and Globe and Mail, 29 October 2002.

6 Izvestia, 3 December 2001; and Alexander Golts, ‘Kursk Firings Should Not BeMilitary’s Last’, Russia Journal, 7–13 December 2001.

7 See Moscow Times, 17 August 2000; and ‘The Chronicle of Tragedy’ at www.mediaprom.ru/kursk/1/eng/xron . . . html (2076/16).



disaster that rescue crews were well equipped but their ‘effectivenesswas reduced to zero by the submarine’s disastrous condition’.8 Hefailed to explain the reasons for the foreign divers’ rapid success,however. Naval spokesmen blamed the failure of the rescue opera-tions on poor weather although according to meteorologists condi-tions in the area were generally fine.

Admiral Gennadii Verich told the government and the crewmembers’ relatives that the key reason for the abortive rescue effortwas that the navy had never possessed the special equipment or thepersonnel to help people get out of a stranded submarine. This, too,was a lie. Actually, it was Verich himself who described the NorthernFleet’s emergency diving service as ‘redundant’ in the mid-1990s.The unique rescue apparatus was subsequently sold off (some asscrap metal on vague grounds) to private firms or sunk in the BarentsSea.9 The fleet command simply had to know that they did notpossess the proper equipment but stalled – possibly causing the deathof their comrades – rather than get help from abroad.10 More gen-erally, both the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Navy blamedtheir impotent rescue attempts on the penniless plight of the armedforces.11

Popov and Kuroyedov (along with other admirals) were especiallyeager to appear blameless because they were candidates for promo-tion – the former for the post of Chief of the Navy General Staff andthe latter as a possible successor to the aging DM Sergeev – and indi-cations of their culpability would have been damaging to theircareers.12 In their position the only ‘acceptable’ offender was an alienship, preferably belonging to a NATO member state. Consequently,from the beginning of the crisis the navy and the MoD accused aforeign intruder of causing the accident. Even though no evidencehas ever been found to substantiate this charge and everything torefute it, they would consider no other theory and some of them have

8 See Komsomolskaia Pravda, 22 November 2001.9 See the interview with Major General Yurii Senatskii in Trud, 22 August 2001;

and Novaya Gazeta, 6–12 December 2001.10 Mark Kramer, ‘The Sinking of the Kursk’, PONARS Policy Memo 145

(September 2000), p. 4.11 See Alexander Golts, ‘Military Reform Sinks Along with the Kursk’, Russia

Journal, 2 September 2000.12 Moskovskii Komsomolets, 15 November 2001.



continued to adhere to it long after the official investigation ruled itout.13

On 18 August 2000 the Northern Fleet held its first ever press con-ference, albeit reluctantly. Steeped in Soviet-style secrecy, the admi-rals were merely responding to the mounting public outcry – andparticularly to the growing outrage of ‘Kursk-relatives’ – and themedia’s discontent with the lack of reliable information. Until 21August – that is, nine days after the tragedy – the navy commandrepeated that there were survivors in the submarine. Only then, whenNATO rescue teams were hours away, did the Northern Fleet finallyissue a statement recognizing the loss of the entire crew.14 At the samenews conference Admiral Popov declared that, if need be, he wouldspend the rest of his days finding out who had ‘organized’ the sinkingof the Kursk.15 Later, in a memorable piece of theatrics, Popovsnatched off his cap and begged for forgiveness on prime-time tele-vision crying ‘Forgive me for not saving your sailors’.16 At the sametime, the Navy had refused to release the names of the stricken sub-mariners, leaving their anxious families in the dark ( journalists even-tually obtained them by bribing officers).

Nearly a month after the accident the MoD got the chance toredeem itself when the armed forces’ daily Krasnaya Zvezda con-ducted a lengthy interview with the Senior Deputy Chief of theGeneral Staff, Colonel General Valerii Manilov. Instead of setting therecord straight, Manilov furnished more lies: that the Piotr Velikii wasin an area far from the Kursk when the disaster struck; that the fleetwas perfectly prepared for any contingency; that it had no censor-ship policy in place; and that ‘absolutely all information on the acci-dent and the conditions on site was made available to foreignspecialists’. For the military’s inept crisis management Manilovblamed ‘persistent journalists’ and traitorous officers (whom hedescribed as ‘scum’) who sold information to the media. He dis-closed neither the reasons why the media were forced to buy infor-mation nor why the Northern Fleet banned its officers fromdiscussing the tragedy if, indeed, there was no censorship.17

13 See AFP (Moscow), 9 September 2002.14 Krasnaya Zvezda, 9 September 2000.15 Clive Burleson, Kursk Down!, New York, Warner Books, 2002, p. 163.16 AFP (Moscow), 9 August 2001.17 See the interview with Manilov in Krasnaya Zvezda, 9 September 2000.



In sum, the Navy’s reaction to the tragedy of the Kursk might havebeen very similar if the accident had occurred fifteen or twenty yearsbefore. Some of their responses were, nonetheless, understandable.For instance, it was hardly surprising that military leaders were reluc-tant to discuss the technical details of the Kursk’s design or wantedto limit the information given to foreign rescue crews to the dataindispensable to their work. After all, armed forces everywhere wantto protect their secrets. At the same time, the obsessive secrecy sur-rounding entirely innocuous information, the commanders’ aversionto pass on bad news to their superiors, the refusal to recognizeresponsibility, the unjustified delays of taking action, the unnecessaryand often contradictory lies to the public and, most importantly, thelittle apparent concern with the lives of potential survivors and theirfamilies all hark back to Soviet times.

The Government, the Legislature and the Issue of Foreign Aid

It is perhaps ironic that Russia’s Security Council (SC) met just daysbefore the disaster and decided on sweeping cuts to the entire armedforces with the intention of bringing military spending in line withthe country’s financial means. Moreover, the SC also resolved tofurther reduce allocations to the strategic nuclear force in order tofund other branches of the armed forces. The latter decision was aclear victory for CGS Kvashnin who had been engaged in an intensepublic debate with DM Sergeev about spending priorities.

Ten days after the tragedy, former Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov, leader of the Fatherland–All Russia faction in the Duma(the legislature’s lower house), announced that the sinking of thesubmarine ‘illuminated the situation in the country, the state of ourarmed forces, and the situation in the navy’. According to Primakov,the military’s decline could only be reversed by raising militaryexpenditures, increasing the legislative control over the militarybudget, and re-establishing order in the MoD.18

In mid-September, a number of Duma members posed hostilequestions to Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, charging theauthorities with deliberately misleading the public. Klebanov, who

18 ‘Statement of Fatherland–All Russia Duma Faction Presented by Yevgenii Primakov’, Federal News Service (Moscow), 23 August 2000.



headed the governmental commission investigating the incident andwho was reputedly also in the running to head the MoD, respondedthat he knew about statements that ‘were not spreading disinforma-tion, but on occasion they appeared like disinformation’.19 Membersof the legislature appealed to President Putin to include Duma representatives in the investigating commission but rejected a pro-posal by several parties and groups (the Union of Rightist Forces,Fatherland–All Russia and Russian Regions) to form an independentparliamentary commission. Given that the Russian constitution doesnot make provision for parliamentary inquiries, even if delegateswere to set up their commission they were unlikely to obtain accessto secret information connected to the disaster and witnesses orexperts were not obligated to attend its deliberations. The Dumapassed several resolutions pertaining to, among other things, finan-cial support for the victims’ families and their own willingness to participate in the deliberations of the governmental commission.Aleksei Mitrofanov, a Liberal Democrat deputy, proposed requestingUS President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair toallow Duma members to inspect American and British submarineswhich were allegedly implicated in the accident. His motion wasrejected by Duma Speaker Gennadii Seleznev.20

Not surprisingly, politicians on all sides used the sinking of theKursk to promote their causes. Supporters of the military elites (andRussia’s great power ambitions) blamed inadequate defence outlaysfor the tragedy and argued for drastically increased state defenceexpenditures. Those favouring robust nuclear forces demanded that,rather than maintaining large, expensive, but still poorly funded con-ventional forces, spending should be focused on nuclear weapons toprevent another Kursk fiasco. Politicians like Prime Minister MikhailKasyanov, who advocated more prudent military budgets (and moremodest strategic aspirations), contended that Russia had to scaleback its defence outlays to fiscally realistic levels and it neitherneeded nor could afford costly single-purpose weapons like theKursk.

19 Cited in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline I (RFE/RL I), 4: 180 (18September 2000).

20 AFP (Moscow), 15 September 2000; and Russia TV (Moscow), 7.00 a.m. GMT,15 September 2000, BBC Monitoring.



One of the most controversial features of the authorities’ (bothgovernment and military) reaction to the crisis was their failure torequest and/or accept foreign assistance until it was too late to helppotential survivors. On 14 August, a few hours after the military lead-ership announced that something was amiss with the Kursk, a numberof foreign governments offered whatever help Moscow deemed nec-essary. Britain, for example, immediately volunteered its sophisti-cated LR-5 deep-sea rescue vehicle and Norway its superbly trainedemergency diving teams and equipment.

Nonetheless, Russian authorities for five days declined to welcomeassistance from abroad, in part because of false hopes that domesticpersonnel and gear could do the job, their anxiety that militarysecrets might be revealed during the rescue operation and theirhumiliation over their own helplessness in handling the crisis. In thewords of New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, the Russiansrefused help because ‘they feared it would sully the honor of MotherRussia’s army and puncture Russia’s pretense to still being a super-power’ and saving lives was not one of their prime concerns.21 Onlyon 17 August – that is, five days after the accident – did the navy’ssecond-in-command, Vice-Admiral Alexandr Pobozy, go to Brusselsto consult with NATO representatives. Some Russian and foreignobservers – and 85 per cent of respondents to a local poll – regardedMoscow’s delay in asking for foreign help ‘criminal’ and maintainedthat it might well have contributed to the death of the survivorsaboard the Kursk.22

To make matters worse, once they grudgingly accepted assistance,Russian naval authorities provided the British and Norwegian rescueteams with inaccurate information (e.g. that the submarine’s escapehatch was irreparably damaged; that it opened counter-clockwiserather than clockwise), forced further hold-ups, and limited theirchoice of action. A Russian expert likened the navy’s attitude towardthe foreign rescuers to ‘open sabotage’.23 Still, on 21 August, the Norwegians managed to open the escape hatch of the completelyflooded vessel. Norwegian Admiral Einar Skorgen who directed the operation was furious at his Russian hosts for concealing

21 New York Times, 5 September 2000.22 Cited in Christian Science Monitor, 22 August 2000.23 See Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘Submarine Tragedy Breaches Curtain of Lies’, in

Johnson’s Russia List ( JRL), 4486 (1 September 2000).



indispensable data and thereby risking the lives of his crew. Russiannaval officials maintained the same sense of overzealous secrecyduring the salvage operations in the summer of 2001, also performedwith the assistance of West European companies and personnel. Theyprohibited foreign divers from going near the front of the Kursk(where the damage to the vessel left its inside exposed), from leavingthe diving bell, or from doing any drilling.24

The President

The disaster occurred when Vladimir Putin – Russia’s popular pres-ident with a 73 per cent approval-rating – had been in office for onlyseven months. A mid-level KGB officer prior to his unexpected andmeteoric rise in the political hierarchy, nothing prepared him forhandling this sort of crisis.25 His decision to continue vacationing fordays after the accident, was perhaps the most fiercely criticized detailof the official reaction to the disaster. Many thought that Putinshould have immediately interrupted his holiday to take charge ofthe situation because only he could have cut through the red tapeand forced the admirals to do their utmost to save the survivors.

Due to his passivity and aloofness in the early days of the crisis,Putin was viewed by many Russians as an emotionless cynic, a gosu-darstvennik, whose vacation was more important than the lives of histroops. Until this point in his tenure he had profited from compar-ison with Boris Yeltsin – widely regarded as an undignified drunk andan embarrassment to the country. In the days of the Kursk crisis,however, people recalled Yeltsin’s impulsive warmth with nostalgia.26

To be sure, in August 2000 Putin was enjoying the first few days ofvacation with his close-knit family since he had become president.More importantly, at this point he was entirely inexperienced in man-aging crises and later admitted that he ‘just did not think about it

24 Magyar Hirlap, 21 July 2001.25 Putin’s First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President, New

York, Public Affairs, 2000, is far from ‘astonishing’ but not without insights into hisbackground. For a perceptive analysis of his role during the crisis, see Lilia Shevtsova,Putin’s Russia, Washington, DC, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003,pp. 115–21.

26 The Times, 24 August 2000.



[public relations]’.27 While Yeltsin surrounded himself with a coterieof advisers who managed his elections and public appearances, Putinkept close counsel with the only people he would trust: former col-leagues and cronies from the KGB and the armed forces. Image-making was not the forte of these individuals. Putin’s Kremlinadvisers – principally Alexandr Voloshin and Gleb Pavlovsky – whosejob it was ‘to sell the president to the people’, were reportedly appre-hensive of military leaders and their contempt for political reform-ers. In the end, they did not offer advice to the president on whatthey perceived as a military issue.28

Independent politicians like Gorbachev took Putin to task for‘missing out on things’ while opposition leaders such as BorisNemtsov called his inaction ‘immoral’.29 In his defence, the presidentsaid that he was closely following events but he thought a presiden-tial visit to the accident site would have been disruptive and wouldhave diverted attention from rescue efforts. Unlike Gorbachev, whonever assumed culpability for the handling of the Chernobyl acci-dent, Putin repeatedly, publicly, and from early on took full respon-sibility for the Kursk.30 He deserves little blame for repeating theadmirals’ lies at press conferences in Russia and abroad becausewhatever direct information he had came from the military.31 Indeed,it should be noted that Putin was fed the same misleading informa-tion as the rest of the population and, therefore, the vicious criticismhe received from some journalists was simply unfair. The presidentmust be faulted, however, for defending the admirals’ decision todelay informing the public by saying that two days were necessary forthe navy ‘to find out what was happening’.32 He also erred in doingnothing to discourage the military elite’s persistent but groundless

27 Moskovskii Komsomolets, 16 July 2001. See also, Lilia Shevtsova, ‘From Yeltsin to Putin: The Evolution of Presidential Power’, in Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova (eds), Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition,Washington, DC, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001, pp. 96–7.

28 See www.gazeta.ru, 21 August 2000.29 Interfax (St Petersburg), 15 September 2000; and Straits Times (Singapore), 20

August 2000.30 See, for instance, Reuters (Moscow), 26 August 2000.31 See, for instance, Moscow Times, 2 September 2000; his interview with CNN’s

Larry King in JRL, 4501 (9 September 2000); and Washington Post, 8 September 2000.32 Cited by Reuters (Moscow), 18 August 2000. See also Vremya MN, 19 August

2000; and Moscow Times, 2 September 2000.



charges that the disaster was caused by a British or an Americanvessel. In the aftermath of the crisis Putin realized that the admiralsconsistently misled him in order to undermine his policy of improv-ing relations with Britain and the United States by insisting on thecollision theory.33

Unlike Gorbachev, who used the May 1987 Red Square landing ofa West German teenager and his Cessna as a convenient pretext tofire troublesome generals, in the days following the Kursk accidentPutin did not give in to whatever temptation he might have felt topurge the military leadership. In fact, he refused to accept the res-ignation letters dutifully submitted by Sergeev, Kuroyedov, and Popovby saying that no blame should be assigned until the full details ofthe tragedy were established.34 Instead, Putin used the occasion toassign blame to his political enemies like Boris Berezovsky, VladimirGusinsky – who happened to control some of the media outlets socritical of him – and other tycoons ‘who had assisted in the destruc-tion of the army, the fleet, and the state’, people with ‘villas in Spainand the south of France’.35

On 23 August Putin finally made the journey to Vidayevo, the des-olate navy town where the submariners’ families lived. In a three-hour meeting held at the local House of Culture, the president triedto console the relatives and reassure them that they would be takencare of. In Vidayevo Putin made two important but controversialpublic gestures. The first concerned an unprecedentedly generousstate-provided compensation package for the relatives. Each victim’simmediate family promptly received a new apartment and 720,000roubles (about $26,000). The City of Kursk, which gave its name toand sponsored the crew of the submarine, granted free electricity,telephone services, and public transport to family members. (Sixteenwidows announced their intention to move there from Vidayevo inthe days following the disaster.) Furthermore, all crew members wereposthumously decorated with the Order of Valour, while the com-mander of the Kursk, Captain Gennadii Lyachin – who, incidentally,earned less than a Kursk trolleybus driver – was awarded the title of

33 See Robert Moore, A Time To Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy, New York,Crown, 2002, p. 247.

34 Cited by RFE/RL I, 4: 163 (24 August 2000).35 See, for instance, AP (Moscow), 23 August 2000; and AFP (Moscow), 13

September 2000.



Hero of Russia. (In an act of commemoration that borders on thebizarre, the Kursk itself was also awarded a posthumous prize, ‘Forthe Best Shot at a Naval Target’.36) In addition, private donors andnumerous Russian and foreign enterprises and governments con-tributed to charities to help the victims’ relatives.37

The state’s unexpected magnanimity and the huge disparitybetween the compensation extended to the survivors of the Kursk’screw and that provided to the families of Russia’s other military casu-alties did not fail to arise suspicion. As one family member said,

We get a lot more than the Chechen widows, ten times more. The Russiangovernment doesn’t give out money like that for nothing; I think they boughtus off. There must be something they are trying to hide. They must be feelingguilty.38

In 2000, the standard payment for the death of a contract soldier was3,600 roubles ($130, i.e. 0.5 per cent of the payment to the Kurskfamilies) plus 750 roubles for each immediate family member.39

Moreover, aside from the insultingly paltry financial restitution, inrecent times Soviet/Russian war dead were surrounded by officialindifference or worse. In many cases soldiers who fell in Afghanistanin the 1980s, or in the Chechen campaigns a decade later, frequentlywent unburied for years and their families were informed that theydied of illness or in traffic accidents. The coffins of combat dead havebeen routinely distributed around ordinary graveyards without ref-erence to the place and cause of death in order to conceal the extentof the carnage.40 As Veronika Marchenko, the head of the Mothers’Rights Foundation asked, did the authorities consider it ‘more hon-ourable to die underwater than in a burning tank in Grozny?’41

36 Kommersant, 23 September 2002.37 See Moscow Times, 23 August 2000.38 AFP (Moscow), 9 August 2001.39 Interview with General Valerii Manilov in Krasnaya Zvezda, 9 September 2000;

Los Angeles Times, 26 September 2000; and interview with Admiral Eduard Baltin inNezavisimaya Gazeta, 11 August 2001.

40 Catherine Merridale, ‘Cheated of Their Vodka and Cake’, New Statesman, 4 Sep-tember 2000, in JRL, 4492 (5 September 2000). See also Carlotta Gall and Thomas deWaal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, New York, New York University Press, 1998,pp. 14–17; and Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, New Haven, CT,Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 110–11.

41 Quoted in Izvestia, 28 August 2002.



The second gesture was the president’s pledge to bring up theKursk from the bottom of the sea and return the remains of the crewto their relatives, regardless of cost. Well-aware of the importance ofdeath rites in Russian tradition and Orthodox religious ritual, Putinvowed to grant the families the chance of a proper burial.42 He deliv-ered on his promise in October 2001, after numerous delays. Someadmirals and pundits criticized the effort, however, charging that thelifting of the Kursk, in effect, became the test of Putin’s word and themark of his resolve at enormous public expense. Military leaders hadopenly pondered whether the cost of the operation, approximately$130 million – almost twice the entire annual budget for runningRussia’s fleet of submarines – might not have been better spent elsewhere.43 These funds would have gone far to provide advancedtraining for emergency service personnel and to equip the navy with up-to-date rescue equipment. Notwithstanding the financial andopportunity costs, keeping his promise had fuelled the president’spost-Kursk domestic standing.

The popular reaction to his management of the crisis signified thefirst serious public opposition Putin had faced in his entire career.Still, while a large majority (73 per cent according to one poll)thought that Putin should have been at the site of the accident pro-viding help and moral support, nearly 60 per cent said that theirviews of the president had not changed and only 27.8 per cent pro-fessed a diminished esteem for him.44 In the end, Putin – who in June2001 called the Kursk fiasco the worst experience of his presidency –had suffered surprisingly little damage to his popularity from his handling of the crisis.45

THE INVESTIGATION

Given the magnitude of the tragedy and the publicity surroundingit, identifying its cause assumed paramount importance. The maininvestigation was headed by the Prosecutor General of the Russian

42 See, for instance, Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia,London, Granta Books, 2000.

43 See the interview with Vice-Admiral (Ret.) Yurii Senatsky in Guardian, 17 September 2001.

44 Vremya Novosty, 22 August 2000.45 See the interview in Interfax (Moscow), 12 June 2001.



Federation, Vladimir Ustinov. A governmental commission led byDeputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and the Federal SecurityService (FSB) – the successor of the KGB – conducted separateinquiries. There were several early signs that these were not going tobe impartial investigations. For instance, nearly half of Klebanov’scommission was comprised of officials – himself as well as high-ranking naval officers including Kuroyedov – with potential vestedinterests in blocking certain angles of the investigation.46 At the same time, independent experts were not asked to participate in theinquiry. President Putin assigned the FSB to find out whether or notthere were grounds for preparing a criminal case. Nonetheless, leg-islation regulated the investigative activities of the special servicesand, strictly speaking, the FSB’s involvement in the case was illegal.47

One objective circumstance, however, greatly contributed to the thoroughness of the investigation. The fact that the Kursk sank in relatively shallow waters (about 100 metres) permitted its lifting and careful inspection.

The Theories

Most experts quickly agreed that the direct cause of the sinking wasthe detonation of a practice torpedo in the Kursk’s bow. The key ques-tion that remained, therefore, was what caused the explosion of thatweapon. Throughout the course of the investigation two theorieswere favoured to explain the accident. The leading cause entertainedby the majority of the investigators was an underwater collision of theKursk with a foreign vessel which, in turn set off a torpedo. Militaryleaders (who presented it as actual fact on 14 August 200048), con-servative and right-wing politicians, and generally those who had a vested interest in poor relations between Russia and the Westendorsed this scenario. There was some circumstantial evidence toadvance their position: three foreign submarines, the USS Memphisand the USS Toledo of the United States and the British HMS

46 See Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye, 2 March 2001; and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 13March 2001. See also Pavel Baev, ‘The Russian Navy after the Kursk: Still Proud butwith Poor Navigation’, PONARS Policy Memo 215 (December 2001), p. 2.

47 Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye, 29 (10 August 2001).48 Burleson, Kursk Down!, op. cit., p. 113.



Splendid were monitoring the Russian naval exercise in the BarentsSea although nowhere near the vicinity of the manoeuvres. BothLondon and Washington categorically denied their vessels’ involve-ment and there was no indication of foul play. Still, a number of stateand military leaders – including Deputy Prime Minister Klebanov,Navy Commander Kuroyedov, and some Duma members – con-tinued to maintain that the only true cause for the sinking of theKursk was its collision with a foreign submarine with no evidence tosupport their contention.49

The second plausible cause of the tragedy was the spontaneousdetonation of the practice torpedo (that is, it was the direct and notthe indirect source of the accident). The investigation eventually con-cluded that this was the mishap’s immediate cause. Although vehe-mently opposed by military leaders, there were logical and conclusiveexplanations in the Russian media, as early as January 2001, to showwhy this was the only rationale for the accident.50 What actually hap-pened was that a practice torpedo fuelled with an extremely unsta-ble and combustible substance (hydrogen peroxide) exploded andset off the other weapons in the torpedo bay.

Numerous additional hypotheses were also publicly contemplated,often by individuals who were far from objective observers. One ofthese was the purported Muslim or terrorist connection which sug-gested that the two Daghestani weapons specialists aboard the Kurskto oversee torpedo tests were, in fact, Chechen terrorists. The con-firmation of this hypothesis by the Supreme Military Council of theChechen Mujahidin did not ease its debunking.51 Evidently someinvestigators were ‘absolutely clear’ six months after the accident thatthe Kursk did not collide with a foreign submarine but was actuallythe victim of a torpedo attack by the USS Memphis.52 Prominent arti-cles in German and British magazines and newspapers (Der Spiegel,Berliner Zeitung, Sunday Times) – as well as in Russian publications such

49 See, for instance, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12–13 September 2000; AFP (Moscow),25 October 2000; Zavtra, 48, (November 2000); UPI (Moscow), 5 November 2000;Reuters (Brussels), 10 November 2000; and Izvestia, 25 March 2002.

50 See Obshchaya Gazeta, 3 (January 2001); and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12 January2001. See also Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 26 May 2001.

51 See RFE/RL I, 4: 164 (25 August 2000); the Kavkaz Tsentr document inwww.kolumbus.fi/kavkaz/english/25_8.htm, in JRL, 4480 (28 August 2000); and Interfax (Moscow), 29 August 2000, in JRL, 4484 (29 August 2000).

52 See Vadim Saranov’s report in Versiya, 17–23 April 2001.



as Zhizn and Novaya Gazeta – claimed to have been in possession ofdocuments indicating that the Kursk was disabled by an underwatertorpedo accidentally launched by the Piotr Velikii.53 Navy SpokesmanCaptain Igor Dygalo described these suggestions as ‘invention andprovocation’.54

Several sources suggested that a collision with another Russianvessel (possibly a supply ship) was responsible for the Kursk’sdemise.55 Even the extremely remote chance that a mutiny broke outaboard the Kursk received some attention fuelled by rumours andmisinformation.56 Finally, investigators also considered the possi-bility of the submarine’s collision with an underwater mine, possiblyleft behind as long ago as the Second World War. Nonetheless, it wasdifficult to comprehend that any naval mine could have producedthe kind of damage the Kursk sustained.

Findings and Repercussions

In August 2002 Prosecutor General Ustinov submitted a 133-volumetop-secret final report concluding his investigation into the Kurskdisaster. Within a few days, the government published a four-pagesummary of Ustinov’s findings in the daily Rossiiskaia Gazeta.57 Thereport blamed the tragedy on a practice torpedo leaking its volatilehydrogen peroxide fuel in the torpedo bay. More generally, it uncov-ered a shocking level of negligence on all levels of the command;stunning breaches of discipline; and shoddy, obsolete and poorlymaintained equipment, but did not specifically blame anyone.

In 1955, after a fatal accident on the HMS Sidon, the British Admiralty banned the use of the high-test peroxide (or hydrogen peroxide) for torpedo propulsion.58 Nearly half a century later theKursk’s torpedoes were still fuelled by this volatile substance which

53 Der Spiegel, 16 October 2000; RFE/RL I, 4: 215 (6 November 2000); and SundayTimes, 4 March 2001. For a Russian commentary on this hypothesis, see Segodnya, 6March 2001.

54 ITAR-TASS (Moscow), 5 March 2001.55 See, for instance, Magyar Nemzet, 18 February 2002.56 See Versiya, 10 April 2001; and Komsomolskaya Pravda, 21 April 2001.57 Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 29 August 2002.58 For more details about the fuel, see Moore, A Time To Die, op. cit., pp. 32–3.



permitted higher speed and range than conventional propellants.Still, Rear Admiral Valerii Dorogin – a Duma deputy who was involved in the investigation as an expert – agreed with Ustinov’sverdict that the equipment was not to be blamed for the mishap.Dorogin insisted that there was nothing wrong with the torpedo on theKursk and it boasted a 99.99 per cent reliability rating.59 In view of hisstatement one wonders why the Russian Navy withdrew from serviceall hydrogen peroxide propelled torpedoes following the disaster.

On 1 December 2001, President Putin, after listening to Ustinov’sinterim report on the investigation, fired twelve high-ranking officersof the Northern Fleet for ‘serious flaws in the organization of service’.Fleet Commander Admiral Popov and his Chief of Staff, RearAdmiral Mikhail Motsak were demoted. (True to Russian tradition,however, both admirals soon landed on their feet, obtaining posi-tions no lower than their military posts: Popov now represents theMurmansk region in the Federation Council and Motsak is a deputypresidential envoy for the Northwestern federal district.60) In a state-ment that can only be described as peculiar, however, Putin and CGSKvashnin insisted that dismissing the entire command of the fleet had nothing to do with the accident even though all of the officers punished were directly involved with the submarine, the organization of the exercise, or the rescue services.61 In Febru-ary 2002 the president demoted Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov– who was just as ardent a supporter of the collision theory as the top brass – to head the Ministry for Industry, Science and Technology.62

In the wake of the accident a large number of potential culpritswere identified, no matter how implausible, from Daghestani technicians to American torpedoes. It may be the final strange twistto this tragedy that in the end, at least as far as the authorities were concerned, no one was to blame and no one could be heldresponsible.

59 See the interview with Dorogin in Kommersant, 27 July 2002, in JRL, 6385 (28July 2002).

60 Novaya Gazeta, 1 (10 January 2002); and Vremya MN, 13 August 2002.61 See Izvestia, 3 December 2001; Gazeta, 3 December 2001; and Nezavisimaya

Gazeta, 4 December 2001.62 See Trud, 21 February 2002.



Broader Causes: Shortcomings of Training and Discipline

The accident – considering the state of Russia’s armed forces – wassurprising in terms of the drama it inadvertently provided but itshould not have been unexpected. Many of the military’s problemshave been generated by Russia’s gross negligence of its armed forcesin the last decade. Other weaknesses are the result of subjective butrelated factors such as low morale and professionalism.

In its five-year life-span the Kursk completed only one mission dueto lack of funds for fuel.63 Indeed, many of its sailors and junior offi-cers had seldom or never been to sea. Most of the submarine’s crewwas inexperienced, mainly because there were no exercises held inwhich they could attain or maintain, much less improve their skills.They were hardly prepared to assume responsibility for two dozen livetorpedoes.64 According to the Prosecutor General’s report, crewmembers had never handled the type of torpedoes with which theKursk was outfitted prior to the fateful manoeuvres. Furthermore,investigators found that the submarine’s logbook – which could haveheld clues to many specific questions of the inquiry – was forged.65 Theprimary cause of many of the frequent accidents in the armed forcesis, in the words of the respected military expert, Pavel Felgenhauer,‘poor training, bad morale, and nonexistent discipline’.66

The torpedoes on the Kursk were described as ‘being ancient’(having been standard naval equipment since 1957) but, accordingto experts, they were not replaced because they were both expensiveand extremely powerful weapons.67 It was widely known that one ofthe practice torpedoes was dropped during transport – the impactprobably produced the cracks for the fuel to leak from – but it wasloaded anyway.68 Removing the damaged weapon from the Kursk was

63 Guardian, 9 August 2001.64 See William Odom’s comments in the New York Times, 20 August 2000; Obshchaya

Gazeta, 3 ( January 2001); and Izvestia, 4 December 2001.65 Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 29 August 2002. It is noteworthy that investigators found many

of the same problems following the 1989 sinking of the Komsomolsk, the last submarinedisaster prior to the Kursk. See Tribuna, 7 April 2001.

66 Cited in Christian Science Monitor, 15 August 2000.67 Obshchaya Gazeta, 6 (7–13 February 2002); and Kommersant, 19 February 2002.68 See Izvestia, 3 July 2002; UPI (Moscow), 13 July 2002; and AP (Moscow), 10

August 2002.



apparently not simple because the unloading cranes at the subma-rine base had long been out of order.69 An investigative report pub-lished by Moskovskii Komsomolets revealed that the navy, the Duma, the Federation Council, and the government had been exchangingletters as early as 1999 pertaining to repairs of the cranes used tounload missiles from nuclear submarines but the defence order wasnever implemented.70

Inspections of submarine torpedoes in 2000 and 2001 turned up corrosion in some weapons and many tattered rubber gaskets that allowed fuel to leak.71 These gaskets required frequent replace-ment but investigators rarely found reliable data on their age. Therescue submersibles that were supposed to save the sailors were not equipped properly, their indispensable batteries had not beenreplaced (which was one reason why they had to switch off power toprolong search time), and their demoralized crew had never prac-tised on nuclear submarines.72 Sailors deliberately deactivated theKursk’s emergency buoy – presumably to prevent self-activation –though it was functional even after the explosions. Russian militaryprosecutors contended that if all the requisite security regulationshad been adhered to prior to the Kursk’s leaving its port and duringthe exercise itself, the sunken submarine would have been found inless than an hour.73

Sloppiness and poor discipline characterize not just infantry andtank regiments but also the elite units of the armed forces that dealwith nuclear weapons. There is much dereliction of duty even at thehighest levels. For example, Admiral Popov did not order the manda-tory rescue exercises which would have prepared the fleet for emer-gencies similar to the disaster. One explanation for the idlenessduring the many hours of absent radio contact between the PiotrVelikii and the Kursk was that the fleet command was used to con-stant failures of equipment. According to retired naval officer AdolfMeshuiev, head of Russia’s Explosion Resistance Scientific Centre,damaged torpedoes are not rare aboard ships thanks to ‘traditional

69 Gazeta, 3 December 2001; and Burleson, Kursk Down!, op. cit., p. 22.70 Moskovskii Komsomolets, 15 November 2001; and Rossiiskie Vesti, 11 July 2002.71 See, for instance, Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 29 August 2002.72 See Moore, A Time To Die, op. cit., pp. 125–8.73 Moscow Times, 21 February 2002.



Russian negligence’.74 Investigators also confirmed that many sensi-tive parts on the Kursk remained in use long after their recom-mended service life.

The kind of carelessness so common in the military is generallyemblematic of contemporary Russia. The Ministry of Emergency Sit-uations recently predicted a steady string of technological catastro-phes from fires and stuck elevators to plane crashes and breakingpipelines because machinery and equipment routinely go withoutvital maintenance.75

THE MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC

As a number of observers acknowledged, the Kursk quickly becamea test of media freedom in Russia.76 Media outlets pursued the storywith unprecedented vigour and some of them unleashed a barrageof criticism at the president, the armed forces and state authorities.Some intrepid journalists were determined to bring to the public thereality behind the deliberately misleading official statements.77 Izves-tia, a newspaper ordinarily sympathetic towards the Kremlin ran thefront-page headline: ‘The Price of National Pride: Human Lives’while the more independent Novaya Gazeta countered with ‘OurState Is Not Weak: It Is Irresponsible’.78 NTV, an independent tele-vision channel and its radio counterpart, Ekho Moskvy, provided pain-staking analyses of official statements and their contradictions.

The media’s most sensational coup was describing how NadezhdaTylik, the distraught mother of one of the Kursk crew members, wasforcibly injected with a sedative while haranguing Deputy Prime Min-ister Klebanov at a meeting between family members and the author-ities at the Vidayevo Naval Base.79 The incident was filmed by a brave

74 Cited in Atlanta Journal Constitution, 12 January 2001; in JRL, 5023 (12 January2001).

75 AP (Moscow), 20 August 2000, in JRL, 4466 (20 August 2000).76 See, for instance, Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye, 29 (10 August 2001). I thank

Laura Belin for sharing her knowledge of the Russian media with me.77 See Iain Elliot, ‘The Kursk Disaster: Casualties of the Secret State’, Times

Literary Supplement, 1 August 2002.78 See New York Times, 5 September 2000; and Financial Times, 5 September 2000.79 See, for instance, NTV International (Moscow), 19.00 GMT, 12 December 2000

(BBC Monitoring in JRL, 4685 (13 December 2000)); and Moore, A Time To Die, op. cit., pp. 176–7.



cameraman and was televised in the West but not in Russia. Both thisinexcusable assault on human dignity and the official response to it(‘the solicitous administration of needed tranquillizers’80) were starkreminders of Soviet times.

Even fearless journalists could only do so much given theirrestricted access to reliable information and the persistent misin-formation emanating from the military and the government. Northern Fleet officials adamantly refused to release even the namesof the victims. After employees of the tabloid daily, KomsomolskayaPravda, obtained that information by bribing an officer (18,000roubles), the authorities attempted to ban journalists from contact-ing the relatives of the stricken submariners.81 In spite of their easieraccess to the authorities, none of the state-controlled television net-works distinguished themselves by offering objective coverage. Onlythe crew of the state controlled RTR television network was allowedto be present at Putin’s tense visit with the relatives in Vidayevo; all others were kept away. A Norwegian airplane that flew over therescue site was blamed by Russian authorities for interference until it was discovered that it was chartered by Russian journalists desperate for solid material.82 The dearth of credible informationundoubtedly contributed to the many absurd conspiracy theo-ries independent newspapers featured after the sinking of the submarine.

The attitude of Russian politicians toward the media during the crisis was hardly surprising though Mikhail Gorbachev, usually astrong supporter of Putin’s regime, did concede that ‘People felt thatthe authorities were making fools of them, and the press could getno information.’83 More typical was the reaction of Communist Partyleader Gennadii Zyuganov, who called for new controls on the mediato end ‘anti-state propaganda’.84 President Putin was infuriated bysome of the media’s denunciation of his and the government’s hand-ling of the crisis and overlooked the possibility that the press mighthave actually worked in the public interest. In front of the relativesin Vidayevo the president lamented that ‘Unfortunately we cannot

80 Cited in The Times, 24 August 2000.81 Moscow Times, 2 September 2000.82 Novie Izvestia, 31 July 2001.83 Interfax (St Petersburg), 15 September 2000.84 Cited by RFE/RL I, 4: 165 (28 August 2000).



order them [the media] to stop although that would be the rightthing to do.’85

The same survivors of the victims, whom the president intendedto comfort, were routinely lied to and treated with callous insensi-tivity by the navy. In fact, they found out about the tragedy not fromthe navy but by happenstance (some of them ran into members ofthe rescue team). No wonder that they openly complained that ‘ofcourse the Navy is doing everything it can to hide the truth from us’and ‘why should we expect anything but more lies?’86

The authorities’ management of the crisis did little to reverse thetraditional scepticism with which ordinary Russians had regardedthem. In September 2000, for instance, only 11 per cent of thosepolled felt that the government was telling the truth and 79 per centthought that it was ‘hiding the reasons for the tragedy’.87 A year afterthe accident – with investigators still a long time away from releasingtheir conclusions – 45 per cent of the respondents to a ROMIR pollbelieved that its cause had long been established but withheld fromthe public.88

A handful of Russian non-governmental organizations extendedprompt assistance of various kinds to the victims’ families; their activities constitute one of the few bright aspects of the crisis. TheMothers’ Rights Foundation provided legal aid to mothers of the servicemen killed on duty who demanded the punishment of thoseresponsible for the accident. Veronika Marchenko, MRF’s outspokenleader, wondered in an oft-quoted written statement ‘what to do tomake the government value citizens’ lives more than oil, militarysecrets, or its own prestige’.89 The St Petersburg-based SubmarineSeamen’s Club was closely involved in the efforts of the victims’ fam-ilies to find out what really happened on the Kursk. It was the Club’s

85 Cited in Moscow Times, 2 September 2000. See also David Satter, Darkness atDawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2003,pp. 16–18.

86 See Sunday Times, 3 March 2001; and Guardian, 9 August 2001.87 NG-Stsenarii, 15 November 2000, cited by Shevtsova, ‘From Yeltsin to Putin’,

op. cit., p. 111.88 RFE/RL I, 5: 152 (13 August 2001). See also The Economist, 18 August 2001,

pp. 38–9.89 AP (Murmansk), 27 October 2000. See also Reuters (Moscow), 26 August 2000;

The Times, 26 August 2000; and Izvestia, 28 August 2002.



head, Captain Igor Kudrin (Ret.), who discovered that a largenumber of torpedoes coming from the same lot as the one thatcaused the tragedy were discarded throughout the 1990s due tomicro-cracks in the welding seams.90 These NGOs were the first tostart collecting cash for the families and help fund their trips to Northern Fleet Headquarters in Severomorsk.

IMPACT, LESSONS, SYMBOLISM

Although the impact of the Kursk fiasco on the Russian military wasnot inconsequential, it should not be overestimated. The navy pulledthe torpedoes that used the volatile hydrogen peroxide fuel fromservice, reorganized the Northern Fleet, found the money to pur-chase some modern deep-sea rescue equipment, and succeeded innegotiating a framework agreement with NATO to cooperate onsaving stricken submarines.91 Paradoxically, the military scored animportant victory: its budgets have substantially increased since 2000– though it remains mired in poverty – in part because the accidentfocused attention on its privations.92 The tragedy also highlightedhow far out of sync were Moscow’s international ambitions, its mili-tary expenditure, and the state of its armed forces. Since August 2000– indeed, since 1991 – the president and other high-ranking politi-cians have made many official declarations regarding the necessityof drastically reforming the military establishment but the imple-mentation of many reforms has been stonewalled by the armed forcesleadership. In several public speeches in May 2003 President Putinonce again vowed to press ahead with much-awaited army reformsbut, two months later, the government approved the MoD’s moreconservative reform proposal which intends to retain a mixed system

90 AP (Moscow), 10 August 2002. See also Moscow Times, 23 August 2000.91 Izvestia, 17 June 2002; Kommersant, 23 September 2002; and ITAR-

TASS (Moscow), 5 December 2002. See also Reuters (Moscow), 19 June 2002, in JRL, 6317 (19 June 2002); and Baev, ‘The Russian Navy after the Kursk’, op. cit., p. 4.

92 For recent studies see Zoltan Barany, ‘Politics and the Russian Armed Forces’,in Zoltan Barany and Robert G. Moser (eds), Russian Politics: Challenges of Democrati-zation, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 174–214; and Dale Herspring,‘Putin and the Armed Forces’, in Dale Herspring (ed.), Putin’s Russia, Lanham, MD,Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pp. 155–76.



of conscription and contract-based service.93 The behavioural cultureof the Russian military remains that of the Soviet Army; change isantithetical to this culture.

In August 2002 119 of the 156 people died aboard a Mi-26 trans-port helicopter when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile in Chech-nya. The number of fatalities would have been considerably lower ifrepeated MoD directives that the helicopters not be used to carrypersonnel beyond their seating capacity had been followed: the Mi-26 has fixed seating for only 80 passengers.94 A host of other recentaccidents indicate that the years after the Kursk’s misfortune have notbrought a new appreciation of safety and discipline to Russia’s armedforces.

Only some of the lessons drawn from the Kursk fiasco have beenabsorbed by Russian politicians. Perhaps most importantly, PresidentPutin learned to appreciate the media’s power to shape publicopinion and that the stinging criticism he received could only bechecked by controlling the press. In a remarkably short period oftime the government succeeded in doing just that. The privatelyowned television stations that reproached the president and thecabinet during the crisis have all been brought under the Kremlin’scontrol together with numerous broadcast, print and electronicmedia outlets.95 In December 2002 State Duma Security CommitteeDeputy Chairman Yurii Shchekochikhin contended that, in terms ofexpected conformity to the official line, Russia had ‘returned againto the period at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s’, and that it ranked second after Algeria in terms of the number of journalistskilled. Any official can now go to court against a newspaper,Shchekochikhin said, and collect a ‘completely abnormal sum incompensation’ and thereby assure the publication’s demise.96

Michael McFaul suggested that Putin and the Russian politicalelite might learn from the Kursk crisis that it was ‘best to react quickly

93 See ITAR-TASS (Moscow), 12 May 2003; Moscow Times, 15 May 2003; ITAR-TASS(Moscow), 23 June 2003; RFE/RL I, 7: 123 (1 July 2003), 7: 130 (21 July 2003), and7: 142 (29 July 2003).

94 See RFE/RL I, 6: 158 (22 August 2002); and Moscow Times, 5 September 2002.95 For recent analyses of contemporary Russian media policy, see Laura Belin, ‘Pol-

itics and the Mass Media under Putin’, in Cameron Ross (ed.), Russia Under Putin,Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003; and Masha Lipman and MichaelMcFaul, ‘Putin and the Media’, in Herspring (ed.), Putin’s Russia, op. cit., pp. 63–84.

96 Cited in RFE/RL I, 6: 236 (18 December 2002).



and publicly to criticism’ and that the Russian people would not tol-erate indifference and deceit from their leaders.97 This hopeful con-jecture seemed to be confirmed by the government’s handling of yetanother calamity, the July 2001 crash of a Tu-154 airliner near Irkutskin which all 145 on board perished. The authorities quickly disclosedall relevant facts and conducted a swift but thorough investigation.98

The Kremlin’s management of the October 2002 crisis whenChechen terrorists took some 800 hostages in a Moscow theatre,however, once again lent support to those who remain wary of Putin’sregime. Although following the crisis the president congratulatedhimself and his government on ‘a successful operation’, it is unlikelythat his jubilant public addresses convinced the families of thedozens of dead hostages. Their number has been variously put at 129 and 136, with 75 people who were thought to have been in thetheatre at the time still missing, all but three of them the casualtiesof the special forces’ botched assault. The authorities steadfastlyrefused to identify the toxic gas they used that actually killed thehostages, thereby clearly adding to the number of casualties. Thetreatment of the sick by the emergency workers was crude andincompetent. The authorities charged with responding to emergen-cies were entirely unprepared for the medical care of the victims,even though the imminent demand for their services must haveseemed all but certain after several days of the hostage crisis. Thegovernment forces’ heavy-handed approach was well illustrated alsoby their take-no-prisoners mentality: they shot all 41 terrorists, manyof them while they were unconscious.99 The obsession with secrecy,the disregard for human life, and the negligent planning of therescue operation all suggested that little had changed since thesinking of the Kursk.100

It is hard to escape the multifaceted symbolism conjured by thetragedy of the Kursk and its aftermath. The accident aptly illustratedthe long-term decay of Russia’s once proud armed forces. That the

97 Sunday Times, 27 August 2000.98 See Izvestia, 11 July 2001.99 For a lucid if brief comment on the handling of the hostage crisis, see

David Satter, ‘A Low, Dishonest Decadence’, The National Interest, 72 (Summer 2003)pp. 122–3.

100 See Christian Caryl, ‘Death in Moscow: The Aftermath’, New York Review of Books,19 December 2002, pp. 58–60.



extravagant investments in sophisticated weaponry lack concern withor resources for their maintenance is a legacy of the Soviet era. Theill-prepared large-scale exercise without the proper support of communications systems and emergency equipment illustrates thehazards of attempting to preserve superpower status on a shoestringbudget.

The Kursk accident also reveals that continuity rather than changedescribes the Russian military’s institutional culture and that ac-countability remains a foreign concept. Military elites must haveknown the cause of the submarine’s sinking a few weeks after itoccurred but they kept deceiving the public because no one wouldtake the blame. The Prosecutor General’s decision to hold no oneculpable for the death of 118 sailors and the loss of the submarinesymbolizes the political elite’s own aversion to embracing the notionof individual responsibility.

In sum, it is difficult to identify many differences – save for theinspired work of some journalists and NGOs – between how Russia’snew elites dealt with the emergency and the way their forerunnerswould have presumably done so fifteen or twenty years earlier. Mostimportantly, the Kursk tragedy suggests that, like their predecessors,the country’s current leaders and especially its military elites, aremore or less indifferent to the value of ordinary human life.101

Between the individual and the state, in Russia – as in the SovietUnion – the latter continues to triumph.

101 See also ‘The Value of Human Life’, in Satter’s Darkness at Dawn, op. cit., ch. 12, pp. 198–221.

the tragedy of the kursk: crisis management in putin's russia1

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