It’s a measure of how much Russia has changed that the entire country is reliving the tragedy of the Kursk because a note was found on the body of Lt. Capt. Dmitry Kolesnikov. Thanks to the media that haven’t yet buckled under government pressure, the submariners haven’t slipped silently into the deep–as they would have in an earlier era. Their faces, and those of their grieving loved ones, fill TV screens and the front pages. But Russia has always been marked by callousness on a stupefying scale when it comes to the loss of human life, and President Vladimir Putin’s response to the disaster was very much in that tradition. His initial refusal to call for outside help, coupled with his apparent lack of concern for the families until he was shamed into meeting them, was all of a piece. The new Russia may be a place where most lives are lost by accident rather than design, but the ethos of human expendability remains deeply ingrained, particularly in the KGB-schooled leadership.
The origins of these attitudes aren’t hard to trace. Under the tsars, life for many subjects was nasty, brutish and short, but repression was amateurish compared with what followed. By conservative estimates, Stalin’s victims numbered at least 20 million, 12 million of whom died in the Gulag. As the Soviet Union began to implode, there were hopeful signs–attempts to rescue those who perished from their anonymity. Starting with glasnost in the late 1980s, an outpouring of new memoirs, revelations and articles offered a fuller view of the horrors than ever before. In 1991 three young people were killed trying to block the Army from helping communist hardliners mount their aborted putsch; Muscovites honored their sacrifice with tributes, flowers and impromptu memorials. The new era seemed to promise a new respect for human life.
That optimism evaporated quickly. In 1993 the same Boris Yeltsin who had stopped the tanks from going into action against his supporters two years earlier shelled a rebellious Parliament into submission. More than 100 people died, and the building was left a charred ruin. A year later Russian troops launched the first war in Chechnya that cost thousands of lives on both sides. In the fall of 1999, a series of bombings of Russian apartment buildings killed about 300 people. Putin, who was prime minister, blamed Chechen terrorists. He then began the second bloody war against the Chechens, whipping up the popular support that propelled him to the presidency. But this chain of events prompted press speculation that the FSB, the successor to the KGB, may have planted the bombs itself–a charge Putin heatedly denies. Whatever the truth of the matter, many Russians believe that their leaders are still very capable of making such brutal decisions.
And why not? Brutality remains a commonplace fact of Russian life. The demoralized, underpaid Army is a dangerous institution, with or without a war to fight. Hundreds of new recruits die each year at the hands of more seasoned soldiers and officers who torture and beat them, justifying their actions as hazing. “They broke my nose twice, they beat my head against a wall and a chair,” Kostya Lavrov, an 18-year-old recruit, wrote to his mother. “Mom, do anything you can to get me out of here.” His letter reached its destination only after his badly bruised body arrived in a coffin, with the explanation that he had committed suicide. The lawlessness spills over to civilian life as well. On a per capita basis, Russia now has nearly three times as many murders as the United States–a country that has a justifiable reputation for violence.
Other deaths result from sheer carelessness. Safety measures were virtually nonexistent during the Soviet era, prompting huge numbers of rarely reported industrial accidents. The Kremlin also spent less and less on its “nonproductive” health system, which was one reason for a remarkable trend revealed by Western demographers: in the 1970s the Soviet Union became the first industrialized country in the world to experience rising infant mortality and declining life expectancy. (Today life expectancy for Russian men hovers around 60.) Women had little access to birth control, but free access to abortions–on average, undergoing six to eight abortions apiece, often resulting in uterine damage. Appalling hospital conditions and chronic food shortages also contributed to these trends. In the new Russia, the wealthy can get excellent medical care, but the public-health crisis has only deepened. And in many factories the old, unsafe equipment has deteriorated even further.
To be sure, ordinary Russians are responsible for some of their own problems. Self-destructive behavior–particularly heavy drinking–hasn’t changed much since the Soviet era. Those who drink themselves into oblivion seem to be saying: why should I value my life when nobody else does? Maybe the outrage against Putin’s handling of the Kursk disaster signals a willingness of many Russians to demand a different value system. But the pessimists don’t give them much of a chance of succeeding. And, as the old Soviet saying puts it, a pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
