The Kursk submarine disaster is recalled as a measure of the distance between the deaths of ordinary people and the news Vladimir Putin chose to give the public. The passage supplies few details about the disaster itself; its force comes from the contrast between the crew’s prolonged death at the bottom of the Barents Sea and the presidential announcement about a thriving litter of puppies.

The Disaster in the Narrative

The crew of the submarine Kursk died over the course of eight days on the bottom of the Barents Sea. The account offers no further explanation of the disaster’s cause or the circumstances inside the submarine. Instead, the duration and location establish the scale of the catastrophe in a single stark image: men dying beneath the sea while the event becomes part of a wider portrait of political indifference.

Putin’s Public News

Carrère places the crew’s deaths alongside two other tragedies: Russian special forces gassed 150 hostages at Dubrovka Theater, and 350 children were massacred at the school in Beslan. Against this sequence, Putin gives the people news of his dog and her newborn puppies. The litter is doing well and drinking its mother’s milk; the announcement directs attention toward domestic reassurance while mass death goes unaddressed in the comparison.

Narrative Significance

The disaster functions not as a separately reconstructed episode but as evidence in Carrère’s contrast between Eduard Limonov and Putin. Both men are presented as cold and untroubled by the sanctity of human life, but Putin is the one who has succeeded and holds power. The Kursk crew’s deaths make that distinction concrete: the passage sets a prolonged catastrophe beside a cheerful report about puppies, exposing the unsettling gap between what has happened and what the public is invited to hear.