Man Without a Face : The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (9781101560600) by Gessen Masha

Author:Gessen, Masha [Gessen, Masha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101560600
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

I WAS ALREADY GONE, having taken the job at U.S. News & World Report the previous summer. Before I started, I had flown to the Black Sea for a short vacation. But after just a couple of days in the sun, I had to fly back up north: a nuclear submarine was sinking in the Barents Sea, taking 118 seamen with it.

Of all the heartbreaking stories I had ever had to cover and the people of Russia had ever had to witness, the Kursk disaster was possibly the most devastating. For nine days, the mothers, wives, and children of the sailors aboard the submarine—and the entire country along with them—maintained hope that some of them were still alive. The country kept vigil while the navy and the government flailed in their rescue efforts. Norwegian and British teams offered to help but were turned away, supposedly because of security concerns. Worst of all, the new president was silent: he was on vacation on the Black Sea coast.

The Kursk makes an easy metaphor for the post-Soviet condition. Its construction began in 1990 as the Soviet Union neared collapse; it was commissioned in 1994, easily the lowest point in Russian military history, but just as the Russians’ superpower ambitions, temporarily set aside while the empire was being dismantled, began to reassert themselves. The nuclear submarine was huge, as those ambitions had once been—and would be again, with Putin in power, promising to rub the enemy out in the outhouse. The Kursk, which had barely been maintained since it was launched, served its first mission in the summer of 1999, when Putin came to power, and was to undertake its first significant training exercise in August 2000.

It would become clear later that neither the submarine nor its crew nor, really, the entire Russian Northern Fleet had been ready for the exercise. In fact, the training exercise was not officially called one, at least in part because the participating ships and their men would have been unable to fulfill all the legal and technical requirements of a full-fledged exercise. Instead, the submarine and other battleships going out to sea on August 12 were called to an “assembly march,” a term that was nonexistent and therefore carried no clear requirements. The submarine went to sea with an unpracticed and undertrained crew that had been pulled together from several different vessels, so the men had no experience as a team. The submarine was equipped with training torpedoes, some of which were past their expiration dates, while the rest had not been properly serviced. Some torpedoes had visible rust holes; others had rubber connector rings that had been used more than once, in violation of safety regulations. “Death is on board with us,” one of the crew told his mother six days before the accident, referring to the torpedoes.

It was one of these torpedoes that, evidently, caught fire and exploded. There were two blasts aboard the submarine, and most of the crew died instantly. Twenty-three survivors moved to an unaffected section of the vessel to await rescue.

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