Putin sneaks silently from disaster site

By Tomas Avenarius

MOSCOW (DPA): The angry, mourning relatives of the dead crew of the sunken submarine Kursk apparently showed Russian President Vladimir Putin the door.

Putin departed abruptly from Murmansk, stealing away secretly and in the early morning. He had spent the previous evening with relatives of the 118 dead crewmembers in a barracks near the northern port city.

The meeting was a frosty one. Putin had arrived in Murmansk late, after it had long become clear that not a single sailor was alive. At the start of the meeting, Putin stood on a small stage without ever trying, at first, to establish contact with the people.

At the last moment, Putin canceled a planned memorial service -- canceled it at the wish of the family members and surely against his own plans. Putin, of course, had wanted to take part in the service so he could pay his last respects in front of the television cameras, so he could cut a good figure at least at the end of the episode.

Had wanted to. But he did not -- neither on this evening nor during the entire crisis time of almost 14 days.

Avoiding a total public relations disaster, the Kremlin managed to stage-manage a clever little act to ward off the worst during Putin's meeting with relatives. Handlers made sure there were no scenes to spoil the moment, nothing like -- as had been reported in the media -- people saying: "We would like to spit in Putin's face."

Little of the criticism voiced at the meeting reached the outside. Relatives said after the three-hour discussion that Putin had controlled the encounter "with virtuosity".

The reason was simple: the sailors' widows are just too dependent on pension cash and the sheer weight of the tragedy lay over the occasion and smothered the justified anger they felt at the behavior of the president.

In addition, the Kremlin excluded the media and allowed only its own cameraman in. It issued few pictures and made sure those that were issued were at least halfway favorable to Putin.

Although no one explicitly showed Putin to the door in Murmansk, the meeting was anything but a success and Putin had to leave. He saw that he could rescue nothing more politically from the situation. The appearance had just not been successful in papering over the public failure of Putin the crisis manager.

Putin came on the Russian political scene as a reformer with high claims. He spread his vision of a strong Russia subject to law and order and he called on every Russian to contribute to this ideal. He called on Russians immediately to enter a war in the Caucasus which has taken a death toll of thousands. And in doing all of this he presented himself as a man capable of steering this whole painful process.

But what is the political leadership of a rescue mission for a single sunken submarine compared with the task of reforming the huge crisis-ridden Russia, giving its citizens security and affluence and putting the country on the road to the new millennium?

The long-term mood in a country with 150 million people is not easy to change in a three-hour meeting with 250 mourning people. Political Moscow can now be expected to step up the pressure. Parliament and the media are asking who was responsible for the catastrophe.

Russians will regard appeals for reform by the "strong man" with even more skepticism than before and will be even less inclined to follow his exhortations.

A lack of crisis management and honesty at a time of high crisis already put the skids under another Great Moscow Reformer at the outset of a Hercules act.

When, at the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe, Mikhail Gorbachev proved to be a waffler and not a doer who liked taking decisions -- and who for a long time hid his knowledge of what had happened -- he lost crucial reserves of credit.

Gorbachev's image was dulled and Russians lost their momentum. And everyone knows how the Gorbachev era ended.