Russia: The Victim of Democracy - 25 August 2000

Few recent human disasters can be more painful to go on thinking about than the fate of the 118 men aboard the submarine Kursk which even all the Russian authorities agree went down like a rock with no distress signal.

But what is, I think, worth going into is the official navy account of what happened, the swift rejection of that account by independent journalists and experts in Moscow and - more astonishingly - its rejection by somewhere between 75 and 90% of the Russian public in a television-radio-phone survey.

The official account is just what we'd have expected at any time before nine years ago next Tuesday, when the Soviet Union was abolished. And that would have been all we heard except, I imagine, their insistence that the probable cause was an attack by a foreign submarine - Admiral Motsak says: "An attacking British sub."

This story would have remained, in those days, one of those chronic Soviet/Western squabbles in which they stuck to their story and we to ours.

But this time, for the first time, Russian officialdom finds itself the victim of democracy, very much it must be to their dismay.

The top naval brass are in their 50s, crowding 60 maybe, and so were trained as loyal communist warriors who if ever they knew the truth about an accident and felt like spilling it thought again, and like all the millions the KGB kept under wraps, kept their mouths shut.

The old admirals and the defence chiefs announced their findings with their usual old-time confidence on Monday 14 August.

There had been, they said, "a malfunction" which caused the Kursk to "descend" to the ocean floor but contact with the crew was established and now air from the surface is being pumped down into the ship where "everyone is alive" and the vessel's two nuclear reactors have been shut down. These are all actual quotations.

In Moscow, independent defence analysts from several countries - a breed that was never allowed to exist in the good old days - immediately made their own investigation and one expert, whose name I will not disclose, sent a remarkable dispatch to New York.

He reported: "No air power was ever supplied to the sub from the surface. No contact with the crew was ever established and the state of the reactors is still" - that was, as of last Wednesday - "unknown."

And what caused the malfunction? The foreign submariners believe that conventional torpedo warheads in the bow of the ship exploded and almost at once wiped out the entire crew. This version appears to be confirmed by the Norwegian divers who found the hull of the ship smashed.

The experience of handling a bungled military exercise in a democratic country was so new that it must never have occurred to Mr Putin to abandon at once his holiday in the Black Sea and rush to the submarine base city and sympathise with the mourning families.

I wonder if Soviet television ever showed President Reagan with the families of the American marines blown up in Iran or his unforgettable touch - one mourner at a time - when the crew of a failed missile went down with it.

Mr Putin reclaimed these democratic duties almost two weeks after he should have jumped to the act that is performed spontaneously in the Western world by every governor of a province, every mayor of a city.

Of course what Mr Putin did - new to such a public obligation - was something to impossible to imagine in any Soviet leader. He made a proclamation of his guilt and total personal responsibility.

Shortly afterwards, it is surmised, he lectured his whole inner circle on the protocol of this new ethic.

The media here and no doubt elsewhere had been quick to deplore the lies of the Russian navy brass and the shameless long silence of Mr Putin.

"Such public callousness," booms one newspaper, "would be unthinkable in any Western democracy."

But the New York Times recalls an historical fact we need to remember - we're not talking about a communist tradition simply, it's one that goes back to Tsars like Ivan the Terrible, Alexander III, Nicholas II and, of course, Soviet tyrants like Stalin.

Also the long historical repression of dissent springs from a Russian autocratic tradition which the New York Times reminds us values state interests above human life.

I'd no sooner read that than I recalled a scene after the Second War - an intimate chat that I heard about - between President Eisenhower and a new friend of his - Marshall Zukov, no less, who'd been the chief commander of all the Soviet armies, as Eisenhower had been of the Allied armies.

They were reminiscing about the troubles of invading Germany and Eisenhower mentioned the delicate business of deciding which breed of dog, sacrificial dog, could be used to track through mine fields and, well, leave the field safe.

Zukov was puzzled but only for a moment. He was, said Eisenhower, almost startled to reply: "Dogs? We used to send a wave of old infantrymen."

There is a serious topic that is still in question - whether or not the Russian delay in composing an official explanation, and their reluctance to accept foreign aid, is due to the possibility that aboard the Kursk there were nuclear or other military secrets.

The outside consensus appears to be that there could be technical matters - probably nuclear - that the Russians would not want us to know about. After all it's admitted among the Nato allies that the only military field in which the Russians may be superior is in submarine sonar-anti-sonar detection and if any weapon possesses it it's one of these giant submarines with a nuclear capability.

After all in any nation the supreme national crime is spying for an enemy or a potential enemy and during the 75 years of the Soviet Union the Russians, under Stalin, made suspicion of the foreigner or anyone who dealt with foreigners - a travel agent, for example - they made suspicion a patriotic reflex.

And this paranoia went far beyond military matters. From the beginning until almost the end visiting foreigners were practically X-rayed for their intentions and then allowed to see only those places and people and achievements which the government wished them to see. The facts of universal poverty and oppression had to be hidden. It was the same with China from the moment it became a communist state.

I well recall the summer of 1976 when a priest up the Hudson River here, at Fordham University's seismological station, reported an earthquake of some severity in China.

The Chinese confirmed that it was so at a town called Tangshan. But as soon as the United States offered help just so soon the Chinese government expressed thanks and said they were coping well enough with what was, in truth, a minor earthquake.

Pressed to release a likely figure they came through reluctantly with the acknowledgement of "a few thousand lives lost". And that was the end of it.

Years went by - I forget how many - but eventually there was no way of covering up the truth - the Swiss I think, anyway the Red Cross, had something to do with the uncovering.

The simple fact now in the books was that on 27 July 1976 at Tangshan the loss of life was 255,000.

To end up this sorry tale I remember one other small incident at a cocktail party thrown by the British ambassador to the United Nations at his spacious little estate up the Hudson.

Strolling along the lawn that sloped down to the splendid river I came on two men - one an American I knew who promptly introduced me to the other, a heavily-built, sombre man with perpetually dropping eyelids. I'd seen him a hundred times when I was a United Nations correspondent.

He was Mr Gromyko which to my generation and beyond was like saying I met Dracula.

He was, for years, the Soviets' head man at the United Nations, the man who from the start month after month snapped out: "Nyet, Nyet" - "No" - to any Security Council resolution that required the assent of the Big Five. More than any other single man he froze the United Nations in its cradle. I'd never talked with him before.

It was the late 1960s - a hectic and riotous time in more countries than the United States.

It was the beginning of the public protests against Vietnam, there were turbulent lawless political conventions, students taking over university offices, frightening city riots in Washington and half a dozen other great cities.

Mr Gromyko remarked on the appalling state of things in the democracies and I said to him: "Why don't you report riots, student protests, ever in the Soviet Union?"

He put on a wonderful eyebrow-raising show:

"But," he said benignly, "there is in our society nothing to protest about, it is a sign of the public's approval of the system."

Well so far Russia's stumbling march into democracy has shown us that they've picked up some of our worst properties - drugs among the young, random street violence, obsession with public sex, a quick thriving mafia and much revealed corruption in and out of government.

But if there is a heartening thought to be taken from the Kursk tragedy it is that from now on the Russian government will have to be seen to treat less lightly the death of simple soldiers and sailors who work for $50 a month.

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