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February 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Most of the 23 survivors could conceivably have climbed out themselves – the
accident had occurred in relatively shallow waters – but this section of the
submarine, contrary to regulations, did not have the equipment necessary to
evacuate the crew. For more than two days the 23 seamen sat in the dark
until one of their air-regeneration plates caught fire, filling the
compartment with noxious fumes that killed them.
When a Norwegian crew was finally allowed to enter Russian waters and descend
to the Kursk, eight days after the accident, they easily managed to dock
with the submarine on their first try. When they did not succeed in opening
the hatch, they fashioned a suitable tool for the job and, nine days after
the accident, were able to enter the submarine and confirm there were no
survivors.
For 10 days, the country stayed glued to its television sets, waiting for news
from the Kursk. Or from the new president, the one who had promised to
restore Russian military might. First he said nothing. Then, still on
vacation, he made a vague comment that seemed to indicate that he considered
salvaging the equipment on board the Kursk more important than rescuing the
crew. On the seventh day of the disaster, he finally agreed to fly back to
Moscow – and was duly cornered by a television crew in the Black Sea resort
city of Yalta. ‘I did the right thing,’ Putin said, ‘because the arrival of
non-specialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the
disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone
should keep to his place.’
The remark made it clear Putin viewed himself as a bureaucrat – a very
important and powerful bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat still.
‘I’d always thought if you became president, even if you were merely appointed
to this role, you had to change,’ Marina Litvinovich, the smart young woman
who had worked on Putin’s pre-election image, told me. ‘If the nation is
crying, you have to cry along with it.’
By the time of the Kursk disaster, Litvinovich, who was still in her twenties,
had become a permanent member of what had become a permanent media
directorate at the Kremlin. Once a week, the heads of the three major
television networks and Litvinovich would meet with Putin’s chief of staff,
Alexander Voloshin, to discuss current affairs and plan their coverage. In
August 2000 only three members of the group were present: Litvinovich,
Voloshin and the head of the state television and radio company; everyone
else was on vacation, as Muscovites usually are in August. ‘I was screaming
at Voloshin,’ Litvinovich remembered. ‘I screamed that he [Putin] had to go
there. And finally Voloshin picked up the phone and called Putin and said,
“Some people here think you should go there.” And I was thinking, Putin
should be the one calling and screaming, “Where is my plane?” And I realised
that if I had not gone to that meeting, he would not have gone to the
Arctic.’
Ten days after the disaster, relations of the crew were finally gathered in
the assembly hall in Vidyayevo, the Kursk’s home port, expecting to see
Putin. He finally arrived, four hours after the appointed time, wearing a
black suit with a black shirt to signify mourning but looking, as a result,
vaguely like a mafioso. His biographer was the only journalist allowed to
remain in the room, and here is part of how he described the meeting in his
article the next day:
‘“Cancel the mourning immediately!” someone interrupted him from the other end
of the hall. [A national day of mourning had been declared for the following
day.] “Mourning?” Putin asked. “I was, like you, full of hope to the last, I
still am, at least for a miracle. But there is a fact we know for certain:
people have died.” “Shut up!” someone screamed. “I am speaking of people who
have definitely died. There are people like that in the submarine, for
certain. That’s who the mourning is for. That’s all.” Someone tried to
object, but he would not let them. “Listen to me, listen to what I’m about
to say. Just listen to me! There have always been tragedies at sea,
including the time when we thought we were living in a very successful
country. There have always been tragedies. But I never thought that things
were in this kind of condition.”… “Why did you take so long in attracting
foreign help?” a young woman asked. She had a brother aboard the submarine.
Putin took a long time explaining. He said that the construction of the
submarine dated from the end of the 1970s, and so did all the rescue
equipment that the Northern Fleet had. He said that [defence minister]
Sergeev called him on the 13th at seven in the morning, and until then Putin
had known nothing… He said that foreign aid had been offered on the 15th and
had been accepted right away… “Don’t we have those kinds of divers
ourselves?” someone shouted out in despair. “We don’t have crap in this
country!” the president answered furiously.’
The article reported that Putin spent two hours and 40 minutes with the
families of the crew and managed, in the end, to bring them around – in
large part because he devoted an hour to detailing compensation packages for
them. He also agreed to cancel the day of mourning, which was in the end, in
a twist of macabre irony, observed everywhere in Russia except Vidyayevo.
But Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever
again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster – and
there would be many in his tenure as president – would Putin allow himself
to be pitted publicly against the suffering.
In short order, two things happened to cement Putin’s view of his visit to
Vidyayevo as a disaster. On September 2 – three weeks after the Kursk sank –
Sergei Dorenko, the Channel One anchorman who had done most of the legwork
in Boris Berezovsky’s television campaign to create Putin a year earlier,
did a show criticising Putin’s handling of the incident. Dorenko obtained
audiotapes of the meeting with relations and aired excerpts that made the
biographer’s newspaper report seem laudatory in comparison. In one of the
excerpts, Putin could be heard descending into a rant. ‘You saw it on
television?’ he screamed. ‘That means they are lying. They are lying! They
are lying! There are people on television who have been working to destroy
the army and the navy for 10 years. They are talking now as though they are
the biggest defenders of the military. All they really want to do is finish
it off! They’ve stolen all this money and now they are buying everyone off
and making whatever laws they want to make!’ Putin ended with a high-pitched
shout.
Dorenko spent nearly an hour dissecting Putin’s behaviour, replaying some of
his least appropriate remarks, focusing on showing him still on holiday,
tanned and relaxed, smiling and laughing with his companions, most of them
highly placed officials. The president claimed that the sea had been stormy
for eight days, hampering rescue efforts. In fact, Dorenko said, the weather
had been bad only during the first few days, but even that had no effect at
the depth at which the Kursk was situated.
I think it was then, a year after the beginning of his miraculous ascent, 100
days after becoming president, that Putin realised that he now bore
responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. His
transformation was not unlike that of a longtime opposition politician who
suddenly assumes power – except Putin had never been a politician at all, so
his anger had been private but his humiliation was now public.
Six days after the Dorenko show, Putin appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. When
King asked, ‘What happened?’ Putin shrugged, smiled – impishly, it seemed –
and said, ‘It sank.’ The line became infamous: it played as cynical,
dismissive and deeply offensive to all who were affected by the tragedy.
Only reviewing the transcript of the show 10 years later did I realise what
Putin was trying to communicate. He was indicating that he would not press
the line some hapless Russian spin doctor had invented – that the Kursk had
collided with an American submarine. Never mind that crazy conspiracy
theory, his shrug was intended to say. It just sank.
The world saw something entirely different, and Putin learnt a key lesson.
Television – the medium that had created him, a president plucked out of
thin air – could turn on him and destroy him just as fast and with the same
evident ease.
So Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge
of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the
television company. ‘I said no, in the presence of Voloshin,’ Berezovsky
told me. ‘So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, “See you later,
then, Boris Abramovich,” and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya, this is
goodbye.” We ended on this note, full of pathos.’ Berezovsky says he sat
down and immediately wrote a letter to his old protégé, then asked the chief
of staff to pass it on.
‘I wrote about an American journalist who said once that every complicated
problem always has one simple solution and that solution is always wrong.
And I wrote that Russia is a colossally complex problem and it is his
colossal mistake to think that he can use simple methods to solve it.’
Berezovsky never received a response to this letter. Within days he had left
for France, then moved on to Britain. Soon enough, there was a warrant out
for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares in Channel One.
Read Mick Brown’s interview with Masha Gessen here
‘The Man Without a Face’ (Granta, £20) is available for £18 plus £1.25 pp
from Telegraph Books
(0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk).
Masha Gessen will be appearing at the Telegraph
Hay Festival in June (hayfestival.org)
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