Kursk Anniversary: Submarine Disaster Was Putin's 'First Lie'
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The Kursk disaster and its aftermath, Kuznetsov says, was President Vladimir Putin's "first lie."
"The lies began with the sinking of the Kursk," Kuznetsov says. "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."
Kuznetsov, 67, represented the families of 55 of the drowned Kursk seamen. Now he has political asylum in the United States. The Russian government has opened a criminal case against him and issued an international arrest warrant for him. He says the charges -- which accuse him of revealing state secrets because he demonstrated to a Russian court that the Federal Security Service (FSB) was illegally wiretapping a member of parliament -- were intended to prevent him from carrying out his high-profile legal work.
Indeed, Russia was a different country when the Kursk sank on August 12, 2000, during a massive naval exercise in the Barents Sea. It was just a few months after Putin began his first term as president. National television was controlled by oligarchs and had feisty relations with the government.
In October 2000, prominent television journalist Sergei Dorenko ran a one-hour special on the Kursk tragedy on Russia's national ORT television, then controlled by tycoon Boris Berezovsky. After enumerating the government's failures in its handling of the disaster, Dorenko ended the piece with this conclusion:
"The story of the Kursk is not finished. We have only raised the very first questions and conclusions. The main conclusion is that the government does not respect any of us -- and so it is lying. And the main thing is that the government treats us this way only because we allow it to."
When a visibly rattled Putin met with the wives and families of Kursk seamen on August 22, 2000, no one was afraid to scream at him and accuse him of incompetence or worse:
That encounter, Kuznetsov says, may have been "the worst moment" of Putin's life -- and he immediately set out to make sure he would never face anything like it again. (BBM)
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The Kursk Catastrophe, A Lesson For Putin, Is Fading From Russia’s Attention 20 Years Later
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MOSCOW -- In August 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk left a port above Russia’s Arctic Circle for naval exercises on the Barents Sea. Not long after departure, one of the torpedoes on board the vessel exploded in its hatch, killing most of the 118 crew members and sending the wreck, along with 23 survivors, hurtling to the seafloor.
The blast was picked up on seismographs across Europe, but the Russian Navy made no public acknowledgement of the catastrophe. President Vladimir Putin, then just over three months into his first Kremlin term, continued vacationing on the Black Sea and made no statement about the Kursk for more than a week until his reluctant return to Moscow.
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In Putin’s People, a new book investigating Putin’s rise by journalist Catherine Belton, a person once close to the Russian president says the newly minted leader was paralyzed by fear when the Kursk disaster struck, and livid over the ways TV amplified his desultory response.
“He didn’t know how to deal with it, and therefore he tried to avoid dealing with it,” Belton quotes the former Putin ally as saying. “The Norwegians and others were calling in with offers of help. But he did not want them to uncover that everyone was dead, and so he just refused the help -- which, of course, made everything worse.”
When Putin finally visited the closed military city that served as the Kursk’s home port and spoke to a hall packed with bereaved relatives a full 10 days after the catastrophe, he put the blame on Russia’s economic and military decline over the previous decade – before he came to power -- and denounced the TV channels that had slammed his fumbled response.
“They bought the media and now they’re manipulating public opinion,” he said of Berezovsky and other powerful media magnates.
In the months that followed, Putin’s government would bring Channel One under the control of the state, forcing Berezovsky to sell his stake under duress and eventually flee Russia, and seized the NTV channel from another business titan, Vladimir Gusinsky.
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️BBC: FSB asks Russian government for additional funding to bury Russian troops.
