IT IS A uniquely humiliating twist to the story of the lost submarine and the 118 sailors now entombed at the bottom of the Barents Sea: Before August, there was no prouder name than “Kursk” in Russian military history. Today, the name evokes tragedy and shame and the steep decline in Russian military power.
The ruptured submarine Kursk — apparently destroyed by the misfiring of its own weapons, according to data collected by U.S. Navy vessels nearby — took its name from the battle of Kursk, the epic armored struggle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht on the steppes of the Ukraine in July 1943 that finally turned the tide on the Eastern Front.
The largest tank battle in history, Kursk featured titanic leaders like Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, for the Third Reich, and Marshall Georgi Zhukov, for the Soviet Union. When the fight was over, the decisive battlefield was littered with the burning carcasses of hundreds of tanks, many of them destroyed at point-blank range. Tactically, Kursk was a draw, but it established the Soviet Union as more than a match for the Nazis. Naturally, it became a centerpiece of Soviet propaganda about the Great Patriotic War, and it remains a mythic episode in the annals of the Russian military.
How cruel that “Kursk” should now come to stand for Russian weakness. Before the accident that sank her, the Kursk was participating in a limited exercise, a warm-up for a larger exercise intended to echo, however faintly, the Soviet Union’s aspiration to global naval power. But the U.S. Navy no longer bothers to track at close range even large Russian naval exercises, and the listening ships and submarines that heard the dying agony of the Kursk were miles away. Much of the Russian navy is being cut up for scrap metal; the once massive Red Army tank fleets sit rusting; and the Russian military is strained to the limit to suppress the unruly Chechens. Most significantly, the Russian nuclear arsenal rots in its silos and warehouses — indeed, Russia’s worries about a limited U.S. ballistic missile defense are understandable, given the decaying state of this last symbol of lost superpower status.
The tale of the Kursk ought to spur Americans to reexamine the realities of Russian military power and strategy. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia’s ability to threaten anyone outside its own shrunken borders has diminished tremendously, yet U.S. policy clings to the notion that Russia remains, or could again soon become, a great power. Although the power of Moscow is at a 400-year low and may decline further, American leaders act as though Russia were potentially a “strategic partner’ or competitor of great weight. It is as though the loss of the Cold War were to be ignored.
Perhaps more important, Russia is in internal disarray. It remains a vast country, home to a talented and educated people, with huge potential. But over the past century it has moved from feudalism to communism to a chaotic form of democracy struggling to offset the influence of a despotic oligopoly. Life expectancy for the average Russian is declining. The law does not rule, strongmen do. Russia has one foot in the 21st century but the other still in the Middle Ages.
Some have argued that U.S. policy toward Russia should reflect magnanimity in victory. But what sort of kindness is it to pretend that Russia is a very great power when its own people and leaders know it is not? To genuflect before dying imperial impulses by moving slowly to expand NATO, tolerating butchery in the Balkans, and looking the other way in the Caucasus — is this generosity or condescension? Are we going easy on the Russians — or on ourselves, shirking the burdens that fall to the solitary superpower?
Tom Donnelly is deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century.
