Kursk fiasco trains spotlight on Russia's soul

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By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com writer

LONDON -- As anguished Russians grappled with the emotional fallout of the Kursk disaster, the country's flagship newspaper sought to kick-start a national catharsis with a famous refrain from the late folk singer, Vladimir Vysotsky.

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"Save our souls!" wrote Izvestia, echoing the Russian bard, in an editorial entitled 'The Living and the Dead.'

Adding its own cri-de-coeur to Vysotsky's, the paper observed: "The tragedy of the Kursk is the tragedy of our soul. Of our dream. Of our new life. Of our new power. Of the new future of Russia. Once again it's turned out that our life means nothing. How painful, how offensive."

To a casual observer, it might seem that Russians are forever fawning over the state of their seemingly bottomless souls -- sometimes to the point of cliché.

Yet viewed against the backdrop of political upheaval -- and the Kursk sinking is a prime example -- references to the Russian soul in the media and among ordinary Russians are as good a barometer as any of the way the country sees its own plight, analysts say.

Dostoyevsky once wrote that suffering is the origin of consciousness -- a sort of Slavic reworking of the Western world's 'I-think-therefore-I-am' thesis.

Throughout Russian history, from schisms in the Orthodox Church to peasant uprisings to the Bolshevik cataclysm of 1917, whenever big events cleaved the nation, talk of the soul was never far behind.

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In the post-revolutionary era alone, Russians have endured terrors, famines, purges, sieges, and nuclear meltdowns, often with a measure of stoicism that can appear super-human to more tender western sensibilities.

The advent of the New Russia, to be sure, with its western-style time-is-money ethic has meant less time for soulful reveries of the Soviet and tsarist variety.

Younger Russians these days are more likely to spend their time wolfing down Big Macs than waxing philosophic about life's big issues - but crises such as the one served up by the Kursk's loss can rekindle old habits.

About half of the doomed 118-man crew aboard the Kursk was 19 or 20 years old -- a fact that has resonated with disillusioned young people across the country.

Ironically, the Kursk tragedy coincided with a new survey showing a dramatic decline in the Russian population over the past decade, spurred by plunging male mortality rates in a stressed out, heavy-drinking post-Communist society.

The average Russian man can expect to live to the age of 57 -- one of the lowest rates in the industrialised world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been pilloried by the Russian media and ordinary citizens for his perceived delay in reacting to the accident -- and then for not doing enough to assuage the national sense of loss once the magnitude of the disaster began to emerge.

When Putin finally did react -- defending his initial decision to stay on the sidelines and vowing to fight to the end to save lives -- many Russians deemed his performance robotic and lacking real emotion. In other words, to many of his compatriots, he failed to show any signs of a "dusha", or soul.

By contrast, the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, removed his naval beret during a television appearance as he pleaded, wide-eyed and tearily, with the wives and mothers of the lost crew to "Forgive me for not saving your sailors."

"This is the first dent in the popularity of Putin," said Archie Brown, a professor of Russian politics at St. Antony's College, at Oxford University. "His public relations had been very assured and very successful until now."

Brown said it is difficult to determine, at this point, how lasting an impact the Kursk fiasco will have on Putin's personal approval rating. That rating was as high as 83 percent in January, two months before he was elected president in a landslide victory.

But Brown said the welter of publicity surrounding the Kursk sinking, much of it fiercely critical of a government seen as bungling, represented a break from tradition.

"Soviet citizens in the past tended to very stolidly rally behind the flag and take positions in defence of the Soviet State that might clash with human interests... How deep this goes only time will tell."

Brown added: "The Russians have had to suffer a great deal and they have suffered a lot, going back to the Second World War."

Some believe that the omens for Russia were already clear from Putin's behaviour even before the Kursk went down in the Barents Sea on August 12.

Mikhail Ivanov, the editor of Russian Life, recently wrote that Putin's actions to date adhered to a long tradition, dating back to the tsars, of Russian leaders tightening the screws after a relative period of relaxation.

"In this century," Ivanov wrote, "Joseph Stalin quickly dispensed with Lenin's "liberal economic policies of NEP in favour of forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. Khrushchev initiated a cultural and political thaw and an assault on Stalin's cult of personality."

Leonid Brezhnev then ushered in another retrenchment that was reversed when Mikhail Gorbachev ascended the Kremlin throne and "did his utmost to destroy the Brezhnevian system from within."

Putin, Ivanov concludes, is now unraveling the freewheeling legacy of Boris Yeltsin.

Whether Putin can keep up the pace in the days and months ahead may depend on whether a united opposition crystallizes in the wake of the Kursk foundering.

As Nezavisimaya Gazeta put it Tuesday: "Putin completed his first 100 days in power -- which may be assessed as a resounding success almost 'without a hitch'. But now Putin's sprint seems to be running on the spot.."

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