Russia's lost pride

Before Captain-Lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov left the shabby Arctic garrison town of Vidyaevo on 10 August 2000 for five days of war games in a ballistic nuclear submarine capable of annihilating large parts of the US, he had written his new bride a poem: "When there is A Time to Die, although I try not to think about this," he told Olga, "I would like to say, My darling I Love You."

Kolesnikov's note arrived on 12 August, the day on which, in the confines of the ninth compartment in the aft of the Kursk, he took command of the other 22 survivors of the two massive explosions that had killed the rest of its 118-man crew, and sent the "boomer" diving uncontrolled to the seabed.

The last note that Kolesnikov wrote, found in a waterproof wrapping in a breast pocket of his singed overalls when his body was salvaged from the wreck by Russian divers in October 2000, shows that this proud submariner was still concerned with keeping time, even when he knew the time had come for him to die.

It is ironic then, that after two years of painstaking research into the wreck and salvage of the Kursk, Robert Moore, a former ITN Moscow correspondent, and Peter Truscott, former MEP and "independent policy analyst", should give such widely diverging accounts - not only of the likely time of the deaths of Kolesnikov and his 22 crewmates, but also of the times recorded on his last testament, even of the date of his marriage.

The survivors whose names Kolesnikov had carefully recorded in his first note all died eight or so hours after disaster hit the Kursk, says Truscott, taking the word of the post mortem by Russian doctors; they may have lived up to five days, says Moore.

This first note was written on a blank page at 13.15, says Truscott. "With a blue pen, he wrote (the time ) 13.34 in the top right-hand corner," says Moore. He married the "beautiful auburn-haired biology teacher, Olga, on 28 April 2000," Truscott records. Moore has it that this 6ft 4in son of a nuclear submariner married her in March.

In two books about an event whose most important truths are hidden in places historical scholarship cannot reach - the silence of a mass of buckled metal full of dead men on the seabed; the darkness of individual human consciences in the Kremlin and the Naval High Command - it would have been reassuring if the verifiable facts their authors relate had been mutually consistent.

Either way, Kolesnikov wrote his first note about two hours after an 11-metre-long, five-ton torpedo, set to be propelled towards its target by a highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide fuel, long banned as too volatile by the Royal Navy, had exploded in its tube, projecting its vast energy backwards into the submarine, engulfing its forward compartments.

Just over two minutes after this explosion, at 11.30:42am, a second detonation, many times more powerful, caused either by its collision with the seabed, or by the combustion of its warheads, had devastated the submarine.

It is a testament to the engineering of the Kursk that the final bulkhead to the reactor compartment, though it buckled, did not give way: "the world," says Robert Moore, "was one bulkhead (five precious inches of high-grade steel) away from a nuclear disaster."

The Kursk, the length of two Boeing 747s, designed to elude detection in the complex acoustic theatre of the Arctic waters, was the last pride of a disastrously run-down, once-great navy. Part of Russia's "strategic reserve", it was built not to preserve life, but to destroy it on an unimaginable scale. It is likely that the survivors of the accident perished because so little thought or expense had been devoted to rescue.

The most fundamental disagreements between Moore and Truscott are about what happened in the ninth compartment - The two writers give entirely different accounts of the evidence: Kolesnikov's notes and the design of the submarine.

Was it dark in the compartment? Did they have the choice of risking hypothermia and "the bends" and making a "free ascent" through the hatch? Or was the hatch inaccessible and impossible to open from the inside?

Truscott says they had no choice but to wait for rescue; Moore alleges that Kolesnikov chose to do so. Both writers, however, provide much circumstantial evidence about the technical incompetence, fearful and authoritarian mentality and habitual dishonesty of the Russian officials who might have saved Kolesnikov and his men.