Where Life is Cheap - Russia, and the nuclear submarine accident - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 11, 2000

Today's Russians are like the rest of us, are they not? With a president, elections, and fast food. They shoot up the Chechens, of course, but bearded Islamic fundies can't expect anything else. And they may be a little rough around the edges, but gangsters are everywhere. Where Russia is concerned, Western sentimentality and apologetics die hard. The fate of the submarine Kursk throws the reality of Russia into shocking relief. The upheavals of the last decade have hardly touched the ingrained Communist mentality.

Soviet-trained as they are, the Russian leadership from President Putin downward reacted to the disaster by covering up. The news blackout lasted 48 hours. Then the lying began. Contradictory official versions circulated, so that it was impossible to establish timing, cause and effect, the probability of rescue, or even whether there was still radio contact with the trapped crew. Four days after the accident, President Putin appeared in his swimming trunks on a Black Sea beach to hold a press conference, during which he expressed no concern for the men or their families.

After the cover-up and the lying came the attempt to blame the West. A Russian admiral was found to claim falsely that a British submarine had collided with the Kursk. It was put forth as sinister that two American submarines were within 70 miles. The last and perhaps the most wicked element was the refusal to accept specialist assistance from the West that might have saved the lives of any surviving members of the unfortunate crew. Another Russian admiral was found to stress the need to protect naval secrecy from spies. So the British and Norwegian rescue vessels were permitted to arrive only when there was neither hope nor purpose to their mission. The Putin regime preferred to see these men die rather than do everything possible to save them. That is close to murder.

In the Soviet Union, cover-ups and lies were routine. Not a word leaked out about the large-scale rebellions that used to occur regularly in the Gulag, with a subsequent massacre of prisoners. No word either when in 1960 a new intercontinental ballistic missile blew up at its launch site in Baikonur, killing all the watching officials, including the general commanding the strategic rocket forces. Straying into Soviet airspace, a jet was blown out of the skies and its passengers killed on the pretext that it came from the West and therefore must be spying. The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor brought together every one of the Soviet techniques of disinformation. Western monitoring was then the instrument that forced out the truth, as now in the case of the Kursk. Only a few months ago, a train was found abandoned for three years on a railway siding with 200 unidentified corpses of Russian soldiers in it.

The Communist party may be no more, but it is still not possible to bring President Putin or those admirals to account for their behavior. In Russia, contempt for human life remains a constant.