Tragedy In The 'New' Russia

The signs here say Murmansk is a hero city, a label it earned in 1945, in what the Soviets used to call the "great patriotic war."

Great patriotic symbols are still a big part of the landscape. Soviet art remains. Even Lenin hasn't been banished.

Traveling this far from Moscow, 200 miles into the Arctic circle, feels a lot like re-visiting the old Soviet Union.

Only now, you can buy and sell what you want on the street, and the means of production—run down and meager as they sometimes appear—are no longer all in the hands of Marxist bureaucrats.

The people who now run this sprawling, diverse country have come under criticism for the way they handled the sinking of the Kursk submarine and dealt with the grieving relatives of the 118 men who died in the ice-cold waters of the Berents Sea.

Some have suggested that the bad old ways of the Soviet Union have returned.

Certainly, this is a new Russia.

When I lived in this country 25 years ago, a submarine accident would have been a military secret. National crises didn't get played out on TV. I've felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle waking up in a world where so much has changed.

But as the Kursk tragedy unfolded, there were times when the Russians reverted to familiar tactics as they struggled to save their sailors and submarine and national pride.

The vacation that Vladimir Putin didn't immediately interrupt; the foreign help he was slow to accept; the angry mother who was given a sedative without her consent, reminiscent the Soviet technique of silencing critics.

"It's back in the U.S.S.R.," said one woman, outraged at officials' Soviet-style arrogance and deceit.

But the critics weren't silenced. They were broadcasting to the nation from the deck of a rescue ship or challenging the government in the daily press.

There was nothing "Soviet" at all about the official apologies, or the promise now to find the facts, or the startling pictures of the rescue attempt, a real-life drama that officials weren't directing, broadcast live to the nation.

The Soviets would never have put this on TV. The Russians couldn't keep it off.

By RICHARD ROTH