Word: putin
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...Russian government has said little about the Kursk nuclear submarine since it sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, leaving 118 sailors and officers dead. Then President Vladimir Putin waited five days while vacationing on the Black Sea to comment; when friends and relatives of the dead unfurled a memorial in Moscow on the second anniversary of the disaster, not a single senior government official attended. This is not surprising. The Kursk went down when one of its torpedoes blew up. Remembering this sort of self-inflicted tragedy would conflict with Soviet - and post-Soviet - myth-making about...
...There is a contradiction here: The people spearheading the memorial are Kremlin loyalists who do whatever Moscow tells them to do, while the memorial they are building appears to conflict with Kremlin interests. Poborchiy nicely captures this incongruity. At 51, he admires Putin, who may no longer officially run the Kremlin but is assumed to orchestrate the every move of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends...
...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...
...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 is a joke: Rule 1 is the boss is always right. Rule...
...Though indirect, this passage amounted to the most direct criticism Obama has offered in Moscow of his Russian hosts, President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who have consolidated both power and control over the press in recent years. As the U.S. State Department reported earlier this year, the Russian government has "restricted media freedom through direct ownership of media outlets, pressuring the owners of major media outlets to abstain from critical coverage and harassing and intimidating journalists into practicing self-censorship." Though Medvedev, who was handpicked by Putin, won the election last year with a reported...