Despair grips Russia as disaster becomes a drab

Daily affair

Ian Traynor in Moscow

Tuesday August 29, 2000

The Guardian

Two days into the towering inferno that blanked out Moscow television screens and deprived 10m Muscovites of their daily soap opera fix, the pinnacle of Europe’s tallest structure was wobbling last night – a cruel symbol of how Russia’s once soaring ambitions are tumbling into hubris and humiliation.

The Ostankino television tower, rising 540 metres (1,771ft) to dominate the capital’s skyline, was until Sunday a monument to Russian power, prestige and hi-tech can-do, just as – until two weeks ago – the Kursk nuclear submarine was seen as a measure of Russia’s military prowess.

Gutted by fire and in danger of collapsing into a mangled heap of steel, cable and ferro-concrete, the TV tower yesterday made yet another eloquent mockery of President Vladimir Putin’s pledges to make Russia great again.

In contrast to his aloof, delayed reaction to the Kursk disaster, however, Mr Putin was quick yesterday to label the TV tower blaze a metaphor for the state of the nation.

“This emergency highlights the condition of our vital facilities as well as of the entire nation,” he declared. “Only economic development will enable us to prevent such calamities in the future.”

Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, said at first there was no risk of the tower collapsing, before changing tack and warning of “a large danger”. The wobbling spire of the secular cathedral was not a problem, argued Anvar Shamuzafarov, chief of the national construction committee, as 300 firefighters finally extinguished the blaze last night. “All deviations are within the norm,” he said.

Tilting

But a Moscow city surveyor said the tip of the tower was tilting 6ft off center. The main fear was that the 149 steel cables holding up the slender 33-year-old concrete structure could buckle and send at least parts of it crashing.

“The cables are weakened, but not broken,” said Vyacheslav Mulishkin, deputy head of the Russian fire department.

There are few prouder symbols in Moscow of once-hailed Soviet supremacy than the Ostankino tower. Erected in 1967 at the height of the arms and space race with the US and to mark the Russian revolution’s birthday, the north Moscow monument, with its revolving Seventh Heaven restaurant commanding panoramic views of the city, instantly overtook New York’s Empire State Building as the world’s tallest structure.

That was then. Ten years of post-Soviet meltdown, retreat from empire, mass impoverishment and colossal corruption have turned Russia into a vast accident waiting to happen.

The heyday of the Soviet space effort has given way to a crisis where the Mir space station is on its last legs, forever being patched up, and open to commercial offers from abroad. Latest estimates suggest it needs hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent it falling from its orbit and crashing to earth.

August is habitually Russia’s cruelest month and this year illustrates the rule – a bomb in the heart of Moscow, the sinking of the Kursk, the towering inferno. Last August brought more bombs in the city and the start of the Chechen war. The previous August brought the financial crash. And so on.

But while the submarine sinking convulses Russia with grief and hijacks the world’s emotions, and the dramatic pictures of the tower fire dominate the global TV screen, the sad fact of contemporary Russia is that disaster has become a drab and daily fixture. Yesterday alone, in addition to the Ostankino blaze, there were two booby-trap bombs in Grozny, the Chechen capital, a methane gas explosion at a mine in the Urals, and the bodies of two young conscripts were found north of Moscow. They had just shot themselves after going awol from their units.

For the professional catastrophists employed by the government’s ministry of emergencies come the predictions that endemic building, combined with lack of money, will lead to radiation and toxic alerts in the years ahead, as well as air crashes, pipeline ruptures and building collapses.

Last week the Izvestiya newspaper reported that more than 1,000 servicemen die every year in peacetime accidents. The military prosecutor’s office puts the toll from training mishaps, exploding ordnance and vehicle crashes at 1,100, though activist mothers campaigning for better conditions for their conscript sons put the figure at triple that. “Natural wastage,” the Russian military calls it.

The daily litany of misfortune generates alarmist, populist politics playing on paranoia, conspiracy theories and fear.

In the wake of the Kursk disaster, a “red-brown” group of nationalist and communist politicians, writers and editors issued a manifesto for “national salvation” to combat Russia’s “spiritual paralysis and despair. In these days of mourning, we are very clearly aware of the scale of the trouble into which Russia has been plunged,” they proclaimed. “Our people have been waging a great war for a decade, losing one million of our population every year, and leaving burning cities, blown-up apartment buildings, crashed airplanes, sunken ships, and devastated, depopulated regions, as well as countless graves of our compatriots behind on the battlefield.”

Russia was at “war for the right to call itself Russia, to control the territory between three oceans, to speak its native language, to worship its holy things, and to honor its heroes and forebears… trying with its last strength to put ships out to sea and squadrons in the air, to pump oil and natural gas, to heat the houses, educate the children, nurse the orphans, and to keep faith in its sovereignty and inviolability, and in the inevitable Russian Victory”.

Rather than victory, the current mood is one of demoralized defeatism. Even in the holiday season dozens of people are committing suicide; picking and eating poison mushrooms or bingeing on vodka and then drowning themselves in Moscow’s rivers and lakes.

President Putin’s appeal to Russians is that he represents to them the best option for fashioning order from this chaos, stability from mayhem. But while he promises a restoration of greatness, he also told the grieving relatives of the Kursk crewmen last week that Russia had to learn to live within its means. And while the 118 were entombed in the submarine at the bottom of the Barents sea, the president debated Russia’s brain-drain with prominent scientists and told them that only one in 20 businesses in the country were using modern equipment.

Trapped

And if navy manpower and equipment were not up to mounting an effective rescue for the 118 seamen on the Kurks, so the 300 firefighters in northern Moscow yesterday were struggling to reach at least two people trapped in a lift about 1,000ft up the tower. As many as four people may have died in the gutted structure.

All the evidence yesterday suggested that the conflagration had been sparked by negligence and refusals to heed warnings. The fire department said that even when first built, the tower had failed to satisfy the safety regulations. An inspection in May resulted in it being denied the required safety paperwork since its power supply system was 30% overloaded, making the kind of short circuit that occurred on Sunday afternoon virtually inevitable.