There are many lessons to be learned from the plight of the nuclear submarine Kursk. The principal one has been that Russia's military and political leadership showed the world precisely how not to deal with the public at a time of crisis. The echoes from the Soviet era were almost deafening. Just as the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, held his May Day parade in Kiev when the Chernobyl disaster had taken place just 50 miles away in 1986, President Putin continued with his holiday at the Black Sea as Russian sailors lost their lives at the bottom of the Barents Sea on Russia's bleak northern shore.
His excuse that his presence at Murmansk or in its closed outport of Severomorsk, might have impeded the rescue operation was a lame one. It contrasted sharply with his earlier attempts to identify with the navy when things were going well. The Naval establishment then became involved in the most bizarre series of lies and half truths about the situation on board the Kursk. Hope for the crew's survival was held out. Knocking was heard from the hull. There was enough air to keep the crew alive for four days. This time limit was then doubled by the spokesmen for the authorities.
As the Norwegian and British rescue teams approached, however, there was a definite tendency towards pessimism. It was announced that most of the crew had been killed in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Hope was all but abandoned and one could not help feeling that this conveniently reduced the need for representatives of NATO countries to approach the wreck. This secretive attitude and a certain element of military pride may explain the reluctance to ask for Western aid in the first instance. It has now been shown that this pride has been totally misplaced. In about 24 hours a team of divers from Norway, a country whose population is minuscule even in comparison with that of Moscow, was able to open the Kursk's outer and inner safety hatches. The Russian navy failed to achieve this in the course of an entire week.
As the operation was in progress journalists in Murmansk were being fed a diet of misinformation. All worthwhile news on the progress of the operation was being released hundreds of miles away in Oslo. President Putin's reputation as a political leader and as a human being of sensitivity has been severely diminished. He has vast means at his disposal, including control of all his country's important mass media, to rectify his image. This will, nevertheless, be difficult to achieve.
Cold War attitudes die hard. They exist on both sides of the old geopolitical divide but they appear to be stronger among senior officials than in the general populace. Russian citizens have instinctively demanded far higher standards from their leaders in the course of this unfolding tragedy. The words that ring in most people's ears are those of Valentina Aveleni whose son was the cook on the Kursk. It was, she said, a nightmare that the president was enjoying his holiday "while my son and his mates have been fighting for their lives."