The Tragedy of the Kursk: Crisis Management in Putin's Russia1

Zoltan Barany The Tragedy of the Kursk: Crisis Management in Putin’s Russia1 The individual is nonsense, the individual is zero. Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1921 Human life still costs nothing here. Leonid Radzikhovskii, 2000 THE SINKING OF THE NUCLEAR SUBMARINE KURSK ON 12 AUGUST 2000 – the first major accident of the Russian Navy since the end of the Soviet Union – is enlightening for students of contemporary Russia for several reasons. First, predicaments of this sort tend to reveal the instinctive reactions of political leaders to potential emergencies and afford a rare glimpse into how they manage subsequent crises. In other words, the handling of this incident can help us understand Russia’s political elite in general and its head of state in particular. The tragedy of the Kursk was the first unrehearsed, unscripted, event to test the country’s newly minted president, Vladimir V. Putin. It was an opportunity for Putin to prove his mettle and for the world to take his measure according to his response to the crisis. Second, the accident also provided a chance to gauge whatever changes might have taken place in the organizational behaviour and institutional culture of Russia’s armed forces. After operating in a quasi-democratic political framework for nearly a decade, what would be the admirals’ reaction to the crisis, how would they share its specifics with the public and how would they fulfil their responsibil- ities? Finally, the disaster also presented a challenge for the Russian media and its overseers and an occasion to appraise journalistic freedom in the country. In short, the sinking of the Kursk and, far more so, the manner in which the ensuing crisis was managed by 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Texas A&M University (February 2003) and at St Antony’s College, Oxford ( June 2003). I am grateful to these audiences and to the reviewers for their comments. © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. THE TRAGEDY OF THE KURSK 477 political and military elites and portrayed by the media, reveals a good deal about Russian politics and society. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct both the Kursk incident and especially the reaction to it by Russian military and political authorities. The question I am most interested in answering is, what does this critical case tell us about decision-making in contemporary Russia? Needless to say, I am not suggesting that broad gen- eralizations can be based on the decision-making processes I am about to examine. This article is about crisis management and it should be recognized that the ways in which decisions are made in events of this sort do not necessarily reveal much about the institutional dynamics and mechanics of decision-making pertaining to more routine political and economic issues. Rather, the fundamental argument of this study is that the way Russia’s new elites, both political and military, managed the tragedy did not differ significantly from the manner in which Soviet leaders dealt with such crises – e.g. the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 – in the late Soviet period. The Kremlin’s handling of the October 2002 Moscow hostage crisis lends further support to this contention. I proceed as follows: after a brief account of the disaster, its cause and the initial rescue efforts, I examine the response of the political and military authorities with special attention to President Putin. In the following section I analyse the investigation, its findings and its recommendations. I continue by assessing the media’s record of informing the public about the crisis and its aftermath. Finally, I con- clude with some reflections of the lessons that could be learned from the sinking of the Kursk and the way the tragedy was handled. THE ACCIDENT On 10 August 2000 the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy com- menced its largest exercise in more than a decade. The scenario to be played out was similar to those of Soviet-era manoeuvres, the end of the cold war and of the USSR notwithstanding: a clash between two large naval groups with the participation of over 7,800 seamen and 22 submarines and warships – including the Piotr Velikii heavy cruiser and the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.2 The exercise had 2 See Izvestia, 4 December 2001. © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004 478 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION several objectives. First, it was designed to be a show of muscle by Russia’s elite naval units. The admirals wanted to demonstrate the Navy’s capabilities and importance to President Putin especially in view of the on-going inter-service rivalry and power struggle among the top brass, and particularly between Defence Minister (DM) Mar- shall Igor Sergeev and Chief of the General Staff (CGS) Anatolii Kvashnin. The animosity between the two centred on their dis- agreement over spending priorities and, more broadly, on their vision of Russia’s military stature. Sergeev, Yeltsin-appointee, was the advocate of focusing defence spending on strategic and nuclear weapons. Kvashnin, on the other hand, is the champion of the military leaders’ narrow interests and has been a strong supporter of boosting investment in conventional weapons. While Sergeev recognized the limited potential of the Russian armed forces, Kvashnin has maintained that, in order to protect its interests, Russia needs a large and well-equipped military capable of waging war anywhere in the world. Second, political conservatives (and this category included most of the armed forces elite) who still believed – especially in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo war and NATO’s expansion to the east – in the fundamental Western threat to Russia, intended to drive home the point that the Navy had not lost its teeth. And third, the conventional purpose of manoeuvres of this magnitude was to teach naval leaders the control of large formations, officers the management of their sailors and vessels, and crews the use of communica- tions and weapon systems. One of the war-game’s star participants was the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, commissioned by the Russian navy in January 1996. At around 7.30 a.m. GMT on Saturday 12 August, seismic moni- toring stations near and far detected two explosions 135 seconds apart in the vicinity of the Russian naval exercise. The blasts occurred aboard the Kursk, located approximately 140 kilometres off the Murmansk coast in the Barents Sea. The first detonation in the torpedo bay at the front of the submarine wrought serious damage and sparked an unquenchable fire; the second, 45 to 50 times larger with the explosive power of nearly two tons of TNT, in effect demolished the submarine’s bow (front section).3 As a number of Russian and foreign experts immediately suggested, and the two-year long official 3 French Press Agency (AFP) (Moscow), 9 August 2001. © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004 THE TRAGEDY OF THE KURSK 479 investigation eventually confirmed, the blasts and thus the sinking of the Kursk were caused by the spontaneous discharge of a practice torpedo in the vessel’s first compartment. The submarine’s entire crew of 118 perished. The first explosion killed the personnel in the torpedo bay; the second, which ripped through the front of the ship, ended the life of most of the crew. There were 23 survivors who were either on duty in the ninth compartment (at the rear) or managed to make their way there during the little over two minutes between the explosions. How long they stayed alive before they succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning has been the source of a major controversy – like much else sur- rounding the accident – in which opinions ranged from a few minutes to many hours. Once the bodies were recovered forensic experts found evidence suggesting that they may well have lived for up to five days.4 Admiral Viacheslav Popov, Commander of the Northern Fleet, was on the Piotr Velikii directing the manoeuvres. The warship was close to the Kursk when it went down and recorded the blasts, yet Popov ignored the signals, steered his ship away from the area, and ordered a search nine hours later. The Kursk was only located on the seabed 31 hours after the explosions, in part because its emergency systems (including the buoy that was supposed to automatically surface in case of distress) failed to work. While Russian authorities refused to accept any foreign aid, their rescue teams spent days in futile attempts to open the submarine’s escape hatch. Norwegian and British divers, who were permitted to take part in the rescue effort after much delay, accomplished this task in a few hours, but for those aboard the Kursk it was already too late. THE REACTION A number of Russian and foreign publications have described the authorities’ response to the Kursk crisis as ‘a massive cover-up’, liken- ing it to the official treatment of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster more than fourteen years before. The days-long silence of the heads of state (it took Mikhail Gorbachev nine days to respond publicly to Chernobyl; ‘only’ four for Putin to respond to the Kursk), the often 4 See www.gazeta.ru, 30 December 2002. © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004 480 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION conflicting lies, the refusal of outside aid in the critical first days following the accident, the fixation on secrecy, and the disregard for human life, all support this view.5 The Military Leadership The Russian high command took more than two days before it announced, on Monday 14 August, that the Kursk was in ‘serious trouble’ and even then it deliberately misled the public by stating that the accident occurred on Sunday, not on Saturday morning.

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