A year after the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea with the loss of all crew, 300 relatives gathered at the sub's home port of Vidayevo yesterday to remember the 118 dead.
Rain fell from a leaden sky as the families gathered to honour their dead, but eased off later as they laid red carnations near the spot where a monument to the 118 seamen is to be built.
The sun emerged briefly as the relatives, who had arrived in the naval garrison on Saturday, observed a minute's silence in a ceremony attended by the head of Russia's naval forces, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, Russian television reported.
To a drumbeat and the funeral dirge played by a military band, an honour guard laid wreaths while the relatives tearfully laid flowers.
The families then went to the base from which the Kursk sailed on its fateful voyage to attend a full memorial service, and dropped wreaths into the sea. Ships at the pier sounded a farewell blast on their horns, while warships from Russia's Baltic fleet flew their naval colours at half mast.
Services were held in Moscow, St Petersburg and around Russia to remember the seamen who died after a still unexplained accident sent the nuclear-powered submarine, engaged in a naval exercise, to the bottom of the Barents Sea, some 160 km off Russia's Kola peninsula.
In St Petersburg, around 150 people attended a brief ceremony at the Serafimovskoe cemetery just north of the city where Dmitry Kolesnikov and Alexander Brazhkin, two of the 12 submariners whose bodies were recovered last November, are buried.
Kolesnikov, the seaman whose last words to his wife, scribbled in the darkness at the rear of the sub while he waited to die, were found in a pocket of his uniform, was the first of the Kursk crew to be discovered and identified during the Norwegian-Russian operation. Kolesnikov's mother Irina said she hoped the causes of the disaster would one day be made clear.
For the moment, she said: "I don't know who to blame." However, she said she believed President Putin was less responsible than his predecessors in the Kremlin, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev and Mr Boris Yeltsin, "because they were the ones who allowed the navy to become so run down".
But Admiral Kurodeyov insisted that Russian authorities would establish the truth surrounding the sinking of the sub and would not let the investigation slide into the kind of cover-up that characterised Russia's Soviet past.
"Nothing is more important than establishing the whole truth: giving up half way would be taking a step back to the 1980s," he said. He said the investigation was necessary to establish the state of Russia's naval military machine, or "otherwise we will not know what kind of shape the Russian navy is in".
The families later attended a service at the city's Nikolsky Cathedral, where a marble plaque with the names of the 118 men is to be installed.