Hope Dies Hard for Families of Trapped Crew

For families of crewmen aboard the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, the train trip from their hometown of Kursk in central Russia to Murmansk on the nation’s northern shore was a rattling, fatiguing journey from hope to despair.

The trip took two days, and the train arrived one week after the catastrophic accident that sent the vessel named after their town plunging to the ocean floor.

When Nadezhda Shelapenina left Kursk, she felt hopeful that by the time the train pulled into Murmansk early Saturday afternoon, her son Alexei, one of the crew of the sub, would be waiting joyfully to meet her.

“I’ve only one hope now. I’m only waiting for the moment when my son is rescued. Nothing else interests me,” she said quietly as the train crossed a polar landscape of stunted birches and rocky outcrops shortly before entering Murmansk.

Instead, Alexei’s name was one of those on a memorial honor roll of all the crew members that scrolled across TV screens Saturday evening.

Several hours after Shelapenina and other Kursk families arrived in the north, the announcement came: Officially speaking, the navy’s hopes for the lives of the crew had expired.

In fact, the navy had given up hope two days earlier. Its commercial department had received an order to obtain 80 coffins, 150 plastic body bags and 500 yards of red cloth, used to line military coffins, on Thursday, according to the Murmansk editor of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vladimir M. Mamontov, who spoke to staff at the department. He said the navy had other coffins in reserve to cover the entire crew.

The order for the coffins went out to the 35th Naval Ship Repair Yard in Murmansk the same day.

Navy chief of staff Mikhail Motsak announced Saturday evening that the navy believed the crew was most likely dead, but he left a tiny bit of hope. He said the critical survival threshold on the submarine had either passed Friday or Saturday or would be passed today.

Some families drew great comfort from that last bit of information--including Gleb Lyachin, the son of the Kursk’s commander, Gennady Lyachin.

“I live on hope. The entire family lives on hope. After the latest statement, hope is the only thing that we’ve got left,” he said.

“It is extremely difficult for me to talk about this, and it is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. We’ve concentrated only on one thing. We’re waiting for our father to come back,” he said.

However, Sofia Vesilova, 67, was certain that her grandson Sergei Yerakhtin, 22, a senior lieutenant on the Kursk, had perished. He has a wife and a 1-year-old daughter.

“It’s a terrible tragedy for the entire family. We have never experienced a shock of this kind in our lives,” Vesilova said in a phone interview from her home in St. Petersburg. But she, too, saw a small ray of hope.

“Maybe someone will be lucky in this life, and he will be found alive. But with Sergei, we’re sure he was not lucky. He’s that kind of person. He would never abandon his friends in distress,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “He would be the last one to leave.”

Valentina Aveleni, who left her home in Lithuania at 4 a.m. Saturday and flew into Murmansk at 11:20 p.m., did not see the Motsak statement on television, but she refused to accept it.

“I am trying to brush all the dark thoughts aside. I’m just rushing there to see my son and get him out of there, and nothing will stop me, neither their barbed wire nor their lies,” she said.

Her son Sergei Vidchenko, the cook on the Kursk, always loved the sea, she said. Now, she went on, she cannot even look at it.

A week ago, Aveleni saw a movie about an underwater rescue, and she is chilled to think of Sergei trapped at the bottom of the sea. But she said she was sure the foreign rescuers would free him.

“I know he’s alive, almost certainly. He may be sick, hungry or cold, but he’s alive,” she said.

Meanwhile, there was grief, denial and frustration in Vidyayevo, the closed military town where many of the officers of the Kursk lived and where families of other crewmen were taken. Many were furious at a rescue operation they thought was botched.

Nikolai Konyashkin, 43, a senior sublieutenant in the navy who knew most of the Kursk officers, said some people in the town were still clinging to optimism despite Motsak’s announcement.

“But most of us are in a very heavy mood,” he said. “We feel very somber. Our hearts ache for our friends on the Kursk as if they were our relatives.

“We could hope for a miracle, but it’s not the submariners’ style. We’re taught to rely on people. I hope that they will be able to get out of it, but when I look at our life here and the conditions of service, I feel disgusted,” Konyashkin said.

Alexander Avilov, 50, a reserve captain, described the anguish of watching so near at hand the failure of the operation to rescue the town’s men.

“The only thing that I feel inside me is a sense of frustration and helplessness that it happened so close to the base, almost at home. You’re sitting so close to the site of the tragedy, but you don’t know anything and you can’t help your own people,” he said.

Avilov also expressed disgust at the failure of Russian rescue services to reach the trapped crew.

“A country that doesn’t have any money can’t train professionals to save other people’s lives. With a country like this, you can only expect that kind of rescue service,” he said.

Aveleni, the mother from Lithuania, bitterly condemned Russia’s authorities for turning down foreign assistance, and blamed the decision on the president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“A citizen is always tried for high treason. But what should be done to a motherland that betrays its own citizens? Who needs a motherland like that?” she said.

“It’s a nightmare that Putin was on holiday in Sochi while my son and his mates have been fighting for their lives,” she said.

Vesilova did not trust the commanders of the Northern Fleet and thought that someone might have issued the wrong order during the naval exercises that led to the disaster.

“They’ve been changing their story all the time, saying one thing one day and the opposite thing the next. For some reason, they were afraid to tell people the truth,” she said.

“But they don’t realize that hope is something that dies last. Deep down in their hearts, many people still believe that a miracle can bring their sons back.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.