23.08.2000

Politics of the Kursk

There are some events whose impact on the consciousness of the masses and whose potential consequences go far beyond their objective content. Such an event was the loss last week of the Russian submarine Kursk in the Barents sea.

For the families of the 118 men who perished in this incident it was, of course, a personal tragedy, compounded by the nightmarish circumstances in which it took place and by terrible uncertainty as to the outcome. Enraged, the relatives put a stop to Putin's plans for a public commemoration ceremony. A humiliated Putin had to return to Moscow.

For the Russian navy it was a devastating blow to the prestige of a once mighty service that was respected and feared by the imperialists' war machine as the embodiment of Soviet military power. Even in post-Soviet times, as anyone who listens to short-wave radio stations like Mayak will know, the Russian navy and merchant marine remained the most 'Soviet' of the services: traditional and conservative in outlook, proud of the heritage bequeathed by the navy's greatest Soviet commander, admiral Gorshkov - a heritage virtually destroyed by chronic underfunding and neglect after the collapse of the USSR. Recent posters emblazoned with the slogan 'Naval might is Russia's glory' seem fatefully vainglorious.

The navy's handling of the Kursk incident was a complete shambles, bringing out the most negative aspects of the old regime: bureaucratic inertia, obsessive secrecy, confused lines of command between military and civilian authorities, xenophobia, a callous lack of compassion towards the bereaved and, most of all, a litany of lies.

In one respect, however, the loss of the Kursk marks a break with former times, when news of such an event would have been suppressed as a state secret. In 1970, for example, a November-class submarine, carrying torpedoes armed with nuclear warheads, sank in the Atlantic off the coast of Spain with the loss of all hands. It took 21 years for the truth about this incident to emerge. The loss of another submarine off Bermuda in 1986 in an incident which, according to some Russian scientists, involved the release of large quantities of plutonium-239, was similarly hushed up, as was the sinking in 1989 of the Mike-class attack boat Komsomolets. I wrote recently of Putin's evident intention to recreate a closed society on the Soviet model (Weekly Worker August 3). This design, as we shall see, has been dealt a severe blow by the events of recent days.

The cause of the Kursk incident remains unclear and may never be known. Defence minister Igor Sergeyev still maintains that a collision with a foreign submarine was responsible, claiming that "irrefutable data is already available" to support this contention. Rumours circulate that a damaged British submarine is currently anchored in a Norwegian fiord. Whitehall issues a categorical denial. What is clear is that the Kursk went straight to the bottom after at least two explosions, one putatively caused by a torpedo, the second, much larger one perhaps generated by one of the 24 Chelomey SS-N19 'shipwreck' surface-to-surface missiles on board, each carrying 750kg of high explosive. Air and water tests conducted by Norwegian officials indicate that there is, as yet, no radioactive contamination in what constitutes one of the world's most productive cod fisheries, but the condition of the Kursk's twin 190-megawatt reactors, containing some 1.2 tonnes of enriched uranium-235, is unknown.

Whatever the trigger that sent the crew of the Kursk to their graves, it is the catastrophic decline in the Russian economy since 1991 that must ultimately be seen as responsible for the state of the navy. Hundreds of Soviet-trained officers have quit the service because of poor salaries, often not paid for months. It is more lucrative to be a taxi driver than to be an officer on a Russian flagship.

Tellingly, it emerged this week that the northern fleet has no deep-sea divers essential for submarine rescue operations - they were made redundant as part of a cost-cutting exercise, and offers of help from these individuals in the wake of the tragedy were rebuffed by the defence ministry. In one respect at least, this tragedy has produced a positive outcome in focusing the attention of the world on the dangers posed by post-Soviet Russia's totally irresponsible neglect of its decaying fleet.

Not for nothing is the Kola peninsula, with its dozens of rotting nuclear-powered submarines and surface ships and its dumps of spent fuel rods and other nuclear waste, regarded as the number one hotspot for a nuclear catastrophe.

Of prime interest to us, of course, are the political consequences of the Kursk affair for Putin's presidency. They should not be underestimated. It may well be that he was deceived about the seriousness of the situation and the ability of the navy to cope with it. We can be certain that heads will roll - the commander in chief of the navy, admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, and the commander of the northern fleet, Vyacheslav Popov, are likely to be symbolic sacrificial victims. Putin will undoubtedly do everything possible to distance himself from the debacle. But his image as a strong leader and a man of action, the authoritarian vozhd whom so many Russians longed for after the chaos of the Yeltsin years, has been tarnished.

The man who is the commander in chief of the Russian armed forces, the man who bragged that "the president is responsible for everything" and whose autocratic ambitions led him to demand for himself "a single, vertical line of executive power", has failed the test of providing clear political leadership at a time when it was urgently necessary. His instincts, it would appear, are those not of a politician, but of a secret police apparatchik.

Putin found time on his Crimean holiday to appoint new ambassadors to Chile and some minor African republics. He no doubt busied himself with the pressing matter of the state's involvement in ceremonies marking the canonisation of Tsar Nicholas II and family by the hierarchs of the Russian orthodox church. Yet it was four days before he said a word about the Kursk, and that was to curse the devilish bad luck of the crew and the appalling weather. By the time he returned to Moscow, the fate of any remaining survivors aboard the stricken vessel was already sealed.

If the president thought it a clever political tactic to keep away from the trouble, he miscalculated spectacularly. In a development of potentially considerable significance, for the first time since he became prime minister in August 1999, Putin is under a barrage of violent and bitter criticism - not just from media organs such as the independent television station NTV, owned by the hostile oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky (whom Putin has tried and so far failed to imprison), but right across the spectrum.

Normally supportive papers like Izvestia, and especially the mass-circulation tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, have been outspoken in their condemnation of the president's inertia and callousness. After repeated attempts to persuade the navy to release a list of the Kursk victims, it was the editor and journalists of Komsomolskaya Pravda who finally obtained one - not from official sources, but from a senior official who took a bribe of 18,000 roubles (around £450) to disclose this 'top secret' information for which relatives, left completely in the dark by the navy, had been understandably desperate.

The sight of relatives cursing the president on live television; articles such as the commentary in Izvestia of August 17, which argued that "Lying and terror - such are the features of Russian government"; and a generalised loss of faith in the competence and veracity of a Russian state machine that "has been on the sea-bed for a long time" (ibid): all this represents something of a watershed. Russian public opinion has at last found a voice that will be difficult, if not impossible, to silence, and this must give grounds for hope.

It is, after all, the consciousness of Russia's millions of impoverished and despairing workers that must prove decisive in the coming struggle to destroy a system that is palpably rotten from top to bottom. If the sailors of the Kursk have contributed to this fight, their tragic deaths will not have been in vain.