Ask our souls

For officials and military, the preservation of the face was more important than the struggle for the lives of sailors

Everything came down to two words “maybe”. They annoyingly overthrow in the brain. They can’t get rid of them in any way, and I don’t want to. Maybe the knocking from the inside has stopped, because the sailors save air and strength. Maybe rescuers will have time, and someone will be able to pump out. May be...

I do not want to believe that everyone died. I would like to believe that there are no desperate situations, but there are desperate people. Because the agony of Kursk has become tangible. Frost runs along the skin, you just have to think about the last hours of those who survived in the accident and waited for help, panting in the dark and silence.

Living people remained at a hundred -meter depths. And they must be saved. At any cost. Society - Russian and not only reacted to the tragedy that played in the Barents Sea, just like the Chernobyl accident or an earthquake in Armenia.

Forgotten feeling of complete unity. Conversations of strangers in an undertone in the subway and trolleybuses, desperate calls on the radio with desperate projects for the salvation of sailors imprisoned in a titanium prison, calls of friends from the border: “Well? How is it? " And convulsive peering into every new television, fear of missing a new message of the hosts associated with the submarine. However, there are almost no other news on the television screen.

And the complete alienation from this people of the authorities, its soullessness on all floors and at all latitudes from the resort Sochi to official Moscow, from the headquarters of the Navy to the provincial Severomorsk. When, despite all the words and assurances, we feel the callousness of the case is especially monstrous against the background of the paintings of what is happening inside the boat, which draws the imagination, as well as indifference and cold emanating from officials. The chill of fear. Each official and press secretary of the Navy Igor Vygalo, whose main tactical task was to say nothing to the specific and not to clarify anything; and Admiral Kuroedov, who from the very beginning set the cross on his sailors, but for the sake of all pushing the date for the sake of all, when, in his opinion, oxygen on the boat will end; And Viceperier Ilya Klebanov, who considered the meeting with academicians in Sunny Dagomis a more important thing than the direct leadership of a rescue operation in the north, every official, no matter how he acted, no matter what he said, only one thought was turning in his head: “What will happen to me later, when it ends?” Therefore, they lied, confused in the testimony, but did not blush.

The bossy motorcade rushed beautifully and clearly last Thursday along the streets of Severomorsk. Powerful armored vehicles were bought by officials to the meeting. A meeting, delayed not for four days for a lifetime.

It would be so beautiful and clearly organize salvation as the passage of a motorcade. But fear interfered with the assembled. Fear of losing your chair, your shoulder straps. And therefore, they discussed not the salvation of people, but the causes of our accident: the boat encountered an outsider or exploded from the inside. The honor of the uniform of the military and the citizen of Danes was more expensive than the lives of 118 submariners.

And the president? Who was he afraid of? What authorities? After all, he does not need to think about what will happen after. He can do the way the heart, conscience and honor are ordered. Or does he believe that there is no need to interfere with the rescuers, what is the extra boss of the hindrance? Or decided that his appearance in public would sow unnecessary panic? Or did he really believe that the military had everything under control and they did not need Western assistance? The worst assumption that he, like all of us, simply did not know what to do, and therefore waited.

“My first desire was to fly to the place of flooding of the atomic submarine,” Vladimir Putin told reporters only on Friday. But I resisted and I think that I did the right thing. ”

But there is a fact: Putin went to rest in Sochi, probably already knowing about what happened. He continued to stay there even after the information about the accident became public. He signed various important government papers, met with colleagues and subordinates and cut the Black Sea on a scooter. He defiantly engaged in science problems and preparation for the CIS summit all week, as if there were no tasks more important and more urgent (thank you that the meeting of the chapters of the Commonwealth was reduced at least for the cultural and entertainment program). Only after that, the Dent President was gathering in Moscow.

Perhaps Putin was right when he stayed from a throw to the north. The president did not need to land on the deck of the cruiser Peter the Great, and then peer into the abyss in front of the RTR television (state television, the only means of information admitted to the epicenter of rescue work; two hundred journalists rushing to Murmansk were deprived of almost all information and even the opportunity to get into the Severomorsk itself).

But what was worth it to turn to the nation not on the go, with a smiling retinue in the background, and not four days after the accident, but at once. And instead of the nonsense about the “critical” position (then each official considered it necessary to repeat this word) and that everything necessary is done, to say penetrating words not only to us, but primarily the unfortunate relatives buried alive.

What was worth returning to the Kremlin right away? Schreder, too, probably, it was not possible to return from Mallorca to a prayer to a prayer for compatriots who died in Concord.

What was worth calling to all state -owned husbands, so fascinated by the Russian president on Okinawa? And to do this right away, and not on the fourth day of the tragedy, when the Russian president allowed the military to accept Western assistance.

And to demonstrate to everyone that for the country the main thing is people who finally have ceased to be a “human factor”, and we will scoop the sea, until the silt, we will spend the entire military budget of the next year to save at least the only survivor. But Putin did nothing of this. For him, people are in third place.

“My first question was the situation with the nuclear energy,” Vladimir Putin retold his conversation with the Minister of Defense Sergeyev last Friday. The next question, according to the president, concerned the chances of saving military equipment. Then - about the crew.

Alas, everything is in advance. As before, until the last we try to hide everything that can be hidden. As if at a recent meeting in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev shared with the president of experience in holding the May Day demonstrations in Kyiv, blown by a fresh Chernobyl breeze ...