Putin

In private, members of an ethnic group will often say things about themselves that they would not tolerate being said publicly, especially by someone not a member of their group. By themselves Russians will often remark on their carelessness, their bent for the slapdash. This, however, is usually viewed with more affection then disdain, seen as a result of the maximalist Russian spirit, which cannot be bothered with mere fussy detail.

In an article entitled “Carelessness as a Russian National Trait,” Michael Bohm, a former editor of The Moscow Times, lists eight horrific examples, including the crash of a Proton rocket in July 2012 because the velocity sensor was installed with the plus and minus poles reversed. The rocket carried three satellites worth $75 million, and they were not insured. Within Russia planes crash much more frequently than they do in other advanced nations, though Aeroflot’s international flights are world-class and its safety rating is higher than American Airlines’. The sinking of the Kursk nuclear attack submarine in August 2000, Putin’s first crisis, was caused by leaving on board cruise missiles that should have been removed to shore during training exercises and by proceeding with the testing of torpedoes that were leaking acid. One of those torpedoes exploded on board, causing a cruise missile to explode. This, and a long list of similar incidents, caused Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to declare sloppiness “a national threat.”

Nothing is more portable than culture, and the Russians have brought theirs with them to the Arctic. In Soviet times that meant the dumping of radioactive wastes directly into the sea regardless of the depth. In post-Soviet times that mind-set has taken different forms. The sinking of the Kolskaya oil rig in December 2011 is a perfect example.

Everything was done wrong and everything went wrong. The captain had called his wife to say that their “mission is suicidal…. It was prohibited to transport oil rigs in those waters between December 1 and February 29.” In mid-December, tugged by an icebreaker, the rig was traveling from the waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East and was carrying sixty-seven people, which was fourteen more than its crew; both Russian and international regulations stipulate that only skeleton crews be on board when rigs are being towed—sixty of the sixty-seven should have been on the icebreaker. Instead, the rig was packed like an “inter-island ferry in Indonesia.” The captain, who had attempted to resign but not been permitted to, was among the fifty-three casualties when the rig capsized and sank in heavy seas on December 18, 2011, in the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water temperature was 33 degrees, meaning any survivors had only thirty minutes before freezing to death.

In a Voice of America article, “Russia Moves into Arctic Oil Frontier with a Lax Safety Culture?” longtime Russia watcher James Brooke says the sinking of the Kolskaya rig “involved the kind of stunning incompetence that most nations would rule criminal.”

Brooke adds: “Some men, in what can only be described as superhuman feats of strength, donned wetsuits and managed to swim far enough in the freezing water to avoid getting pulled down in the deadly whirlpool created by the massive, multi-ton structure as it sank 1,000 meters to the ocean floor.”

Russia’s culture of carelessness produces the very conditions that elicit its cult of heroism; the two are linked in a self-perpetuating pattern.

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There was no pollution from the sinking of the Kolskaya oil rig, but a catastrophic oil spill remains the main danger to the Arctic. Many experts would agree with Simon Boxall, a specialist in oil spills from the University of Southampton in England who helped analyze BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and is quite straightforward on the subject of Arctic drilling: “It is inevitable you will get a spill—a dead cert.”

There are two particular problems with an oil spill in the Arctic. Hundreds of boats were available in the Gulf of Mexico to aid in the cleanup, which would hardly be the case in the Arctic. To complicate matters, says Boxall, the Arctic presents “a completely different type of environment. In temperate climes, oil disperses quickly. Bacteria help. In the Arctic the oil does not break down this way—it can take decades before it breaks down. Nature will not help us.” The rule of thumb is that what took five years in the Gulf of Mexico will take more than twenty in the Arctic.