On August 12, 2000, during a Russian naval exercise in the Barents Sea a malfunction during a test torpedo launch caused an explosion aboard the nuclear-powered guided missile submarine Kursk. The blast triggered a second explosion a few minutes later and the submarine sank, coming to rest on the sea floor, about 350 feet below the surface. The explosions immediately killed all but 23 of the 118 crewmembers. The survivors scrambled into a small compartment on the undamaged end of the submarine, where they waited desperately in hope of a rescue.
By all accounts the Russian response to the disaster was badly bungled. Although Western military intelligence had detected the explosions immediately and sent out offers to assist, it took the Russians six hours to acknowledge what had happened and commence a search. After repeated failed efforts to reach the submarine, five days after the disaster Russian president Vladimir Putin finally and reluctantly accepted Norwegian and British offers of assistance. Within a few hours of their arrival on the scene, Norwegian divers reached the sub and cut a hole allowing Russian divers to enter it. But it was too late. The crewmen who had survived the blasts had suffocated about six hours later.
For Putin, who had only been president a little over eight months at the time, it was a public relations disaster. With the Russian public anxiously awaiting word of the fate of the crewmen, Putin was filmed enjoying himself at a Black Sea beach resort. The Russian media blasted him, accusing him of incompetence and indifference. When he finally went to meet the families of the crewmen at the Vidyayevo naval base, ten days after the sinking, he was met with hostility. During the contentious hours-long meeting, while one angry grieving mother was berating Putin, a nurse stepped up and plunged a syringe into her through her clothes, sedating her, an incident captured on film.
Putin blamed the widespread hostility and adverse public reaction on the media, which he claimed had “manipulated” the crisis to create a false impression that the Russian response had been incompetent. Ultimately, the beating that he and the Russian authorities took in the media over the Kursk disaster convinced him that there should be no free press in Russia. Russian attorney Boris Kuznetsov, who represented many of the Kursk victims and was eventually forced to flee the country (he now has political asylum in the U.S.), would later say, “When the Kursk sank, the government began interfering with the legal and law-enforcement systems. The government began gathering all the mass media under its control. The entire process of undermining democracy in Russia, in many regards, began with this.”
The Kursk submarine disaster occurred on August 12, 2000, twenty-two years ago today.
The photos are of the Kursk. The bottom picture shows many of the crew, just a few weeks before the disaster.
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