Word: kursk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Read "The Kursk: Accidents Can Happen...
...after months of searching, Tatyana Abramova, a reporter at the newspaper Murmanskiy Vestnik, happened upon the deck cabin of the Kursk in a dump outside Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and a few miles from the headquarters of the Northern Fleet. "It was like seeing people who had died," Abramova says, of finding the hulking section that once wrapped around the central nervous system of the 154-ft. (47 m) sub. Abramova's father and uncle, like so many men in this city pockmarked with Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and cell-phone billboards, were once submariners...
...hall meeting, locals said they wanted it turned into a memorial. Regional governor Dmitry Dmitriyenko pledged his support and the city has set aside a small plot overlooking the harbor and next to another memorial, a lighthouse dedicated to sailors who died in peacetime. (This memorial also mentions the Kursk sailors, but Vitaly Poborchiy, a local businessman and ranking member of the regional branch of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, says townsfolk want a monument dedicated solely to the Kursk...
...Poborchiy is also convinced that Putin is lying. "I want the truth known. I don't believe the official version of events," he says, adding that he believes the thesis advanced by a 2004 French documentary that contended a U.S. submarine torpedoed the Kursk. The new memorial, he says, will ensure that the men who died will never be forgotten...
This is the kind of remembering the Kremlin has yet to embrace. Memorials in Soviet times were monuments to national greatness: towering monoliths like Lyosha, the 115-ft. (35 m) statue of a soldier down the road from the future Kursk memorial. These Soviet-era monuments were designed to inculcate belief in (and fear of) the regime. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has shown a distaste for acknowledging weakness or tragedy. "In the Russian mentality," says Anna Kireeva of the environmental group Bellona, which investigated the Kursk sinking out of concern that nuclear waste might seep from the submarine, "there...