MOSCOW — According to the Russian press, the reputation of President Vladimir Putin sank along with the submarine Kursk. This is not true. All that sank was the propaganda myth surrounding Putin. Russia's president has never had a reputation.
A reputation is something you create through your own actions and achievements. Until now, all we have had has been bogus ratings and propaganda.
People used to believe in both precisely because Yeltsin's successor did not have a reputation. This was Putin's only advantage: people didn't know him, while they knew all the others only too well. Putin was able to exploit what British jurists call the benefit of the doubt; it is better to have doubts about someone's honesty, than to know for a fact that he or she is a crook.
In a certain sense, Putin's refusal to travel to the site of the Kursk tragedy, his open unwillingness to interrupt his holiday on the Black Sea, was his first completely independent act as president. He hid. He decided not to act. This was his own choice.
Everything else had been prepared and calculated in advance — by Yeltsin and the Kremlin "family" when they named Putin the heir apparent; by the image-makers, when they sat their client in a fighter-plane or a submarine, or put him on skis; by the state functionaries, when they devised all sorts of scenarios for bureaucratic reshufflings; or by the general staff, when they presented Yeltsin with their half-baked plan for a Chechnya campaign.
But when an "irregular situation" arose with a submarine, Putin for the first time was forced to take a decision independently. He did the only thing he was capable of — trying to avoid participating in events, to dodge his responsibility.
At first, the president did not show himself at all. Then, when the bewilderment among the population and even the bureaucrats began turning into open outrage, Putin interrupted his holiday and made a public appearance — half screened behind a crowd of Orthodox hierarchs, in a hall thick with gold leaf. Gazing into the television camera with his dry bureaucrat's eyes, the president recounted impassively how he had shed tears as he observed the events from his Kremlin chambers.
The deed was done, and its consequences are now evident. Putin finally has a reputation. The hard thing when you have a reputation like this is not to govern a huge country, but to run a small office. That is to say, running an office would be impossible, but Putin can still govern Russia.
The point, however, has to do not with Putin so much as with the authorities in general. The press, the television and people in the streets are outraged: we have been openly lied to! So were we being told the truth before?
The regime is not being forgiven for the catastrophe with the submarine or for the "rescue operation", which was more like an exercise by the authorities in covering their tracks. In recent times, however, the same authorities have been forgiven the deaths of thousands of noncombatants in Chechnya, the bungling of the military operations there and the rigging of elections.
What happened to the Kursk should arouse horror and indignation, but it cannot arouse surprise. The regime behaved in the same way it always does.
Accidents happen with submarines; this is true not only of our vessels, but of US ones as well. But however terrible the fate of the Kursk, its sinking is only one of a long list of catastrophes in the series of events that in our country is termed triumphantly "the history of the new Russia". Once again, we have seen the struggle of a corrupt elite to hold onto power, along with senseless efforts by the military chiefs to save the dignity of their uniform. The struggle has been swathed in patriotic rhetoric, but this rhetoric has suffered the same collapse as "democratic" rhetoric suffered in 1993, and "communist" rhetoric in 1991.
For the people who have been playing political games, a moment of truth has arrived. These people are shell-shocked, no doubt cursing an unfortunate turn of events. Everything would have been so wonderful, if it hadn't been for that submarine! They were unlucky. They are even convinced that people should sympathise with them, and not with the "human material" that perished in the mud of the Chechnya war or in the icy waters of the Barents Sea.
Until recently, the Kremlin bosses thought they could carry on lying indefinitely, that the country would endure anything and reconcile itself to anything. They failed to notice that a "critical mass" of lies had been reached. Our astounding tolerance of lying and other foul behaviour has its limit.
This might have been sensed earlier, but our country accepted each new step by the authorities so meekly and amiably that it seemed no limit existed.
Even so, the actions of the political and military chiefs in the case of the Kursk were monstrous even against the background of modern Russia.
If only it were just a question of the usual combination of lying and incompetence! The longer the rescue operation continued, the greater became the feeling that no-one would be saved, and that the authorities had no intention of saving them.
It was not just that British and Norwegian help was at first refused. Even when Norwegian teams arrived on the spot, what followed was consultations instead of real action. More than seven hours went by before the foreign rescuers were allowed to get to work.
Then, when the hope appeared that it would be possible after all to reach the Kursk and connect the British submarine to it, and when the call had already gone out among the Norwegian divers for volunteers to enter the damaged craft, our military officers continued to argue that the hatch was irremediably damaged. Norwegian experts had to disprove this through the Reuters news agency! Everything that happened was like open sabotage.
On the Monday morning, after the Norwegians had opened the hatch, our official spokespeople, barely concealing their satisfaction, announced that it would not be possible to use the British rescue equipment.
Although the scandal over official lying had by now taken on an international character, an attempt was made to remove journalists from the scene. There is only one way to explain this behaviour: the military chiefs did not want witnesses to the disaster to remain alive. They did not need rescued sailors, prepared to speak the truth. They needed dead heroes.
After each successive catastrophe, the top authorities usually promise to hold an investigation and to punish the guilty. Then they slam on the brakes.
This time, the authorities did not promise to punish anyone, either for form's sake or to calm the public. On the contrary, it was stressed that guilty parties would not be sought, that they simply did not exist. Only a government certain that neither the "electorate" nor the "population" could exert any influence on politics could show such total contempt for the feelings of citizens.
Here, perhaps, the authorities had it wrong. People's deep conviction that it was the authorities who were to blame for the tragedy was now shown to be correct.
The Kursk proved to be the new moral burden which our mass consciousness was unable to bear. A turning point had been reached. Now, the regime no longer evokes discontent, or even protest, but simply revulsion.
Everyone has sensed the change, though not everyone yet understands what it means. The Kremlin bosses hope that everything will somehow turn out all right. People will curse them for a while, but then forget. When all is said and done, what can the population actually do, these millions of submissive creatures whom the Soviet regime taught obedience, and whom the new Russian elite have been able to manipulate so easily?
The Kremlin bosses, however, are mistaken, just as the tsarist government in 1905 was mistaken when it thought nothing would follow the destruction of the Russian fleet in the Strait of Tsushima. We do not know what awaits us tomorrow. Nevertheless, something has happened. We cannot go on like this. Our patience has come to an end.
The sinking of the Kursk will not be recorded in our history as just another disaster. It is clear that this particular catastrophe has awakened civic consciousness in millions of people.
BY BORIS KAGARLITSKY