Divers Open Sub Hatch, See No Signs of Life

Nine days after it exploded and crashed to the bottom of the Barents Sea, divers opened an escape hatch to the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk today and found no immediate signs of life on the vessel that went down with 118 crew members aboard.

Norwegian divers who opened the hatch’s outer door found no bodies inside, but could not immediately determine what may lie on the other side of the inner door or offer information about the chain of events that turned the submarine into an Arctic tomb.

The news, culminating a weeklong rescue drama, was expected to throw Russia into deep mourning.

Through the day Sunday, Russian television had aired film of the three-man Norwegian diving teams in what looked like bulky spacesuits, laboring in six-hour shifts over the hatch’s circular outer door under 350 feet of water.

In ghostly light, they took measurements of a valve on the hatch and relayed the dimensions to a control ship, where a machinist fashioned a claw-like tool to try to open the valve. One held up a shattered fragment of the hull, about the size of a loaf of bread.

During Sunday’s operations, Russian and Norwegian officials had come up with different assessments of the state of the rear escape hatch.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya I. Klebanov, the top Russian official on the scene, said after being briefed on the dives that the hatch’s air lock--the space between its outer and inner doors--was flooded and that the outer door was badly damaged.

But soon after Klebanov’s assessment was telecast live from a Russian missile cruiser near the site of the disaster, Norway’s chief military spokesman, Lt. Col. John Espen Lien, disputed nearly everything he had said.

Lien said that the outer door was “in fair condition” and that the air lock was not flooded. The divers had concluded that one of Russia’s mini-subs or a similar craft that Britain has sent to the scene could dock over the hatch, make an airtight connection and open the door, he added.

The Russian navy announced Saturday that all 118 men aboard the Kursk probably died after the 500-foot sub sank during naval maneuvers-either from two still-unexplained explosions in the front of the sub or from suffocation, cold or drowning as water leaked into rear compartments.

Klebanov said Sunday that seawater flooded five or six of the sub’s nine compartments after the blasts, killing crewmen there “almost instantaneously.”

Nevertheless, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin pledged Sunday that “until the last minute, we will do everything to save everyone who can be saved.”

That was his most emotional remark on the disaster, but it did not sound optimistic.

“Regrettably, sometimes it’s not us but circumstances that determine how the situation develops,” he added in a televised meeting with Orthodox church leaders visiting the Kremlin.

Putin’s decision to remain on vacation near the Black Sea throughout last week prompted a torrent of criticism and questions about his ability to lead.

But televised scenes of the Norwegian divers reminded Russians of how far their military has fallen since the Cold War.

Why, many asked, could Russian divers not have reached the wreck a week earlier? Yuri Filchenkov, a former navy diver with 15 years’ experience, was quoted Saturday in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying he had called the navy to offer his help to save the crew of the Kursk but was rebuffed.

The newspaper said it is doubtful the navy still has the pressurized suits and other gear necessary for deep-sea work.

Specialized ships on which deep-sea divers were based have been mothballed and navy diving schools closed since the early 1990s because of dwindling defense budgets.

Earlier Sunday, families of the crewmen continued to arrive at Vidyayevo, the base town of the Kursk. Some of them were still hopeful that their loved ones had survived the ordeal.

Three-year-old Lena Korobkov and her mother, Irina Korobkov, of St. Petersburg were met at the Murmansk railway station by Irina’s mother, her face crumpled with grief.

“Don’t cry, Mama. Tears frighten Lena,” begged Irina, as they hugged each other for comfort, but the sobs heaved from her mother’s chest.

The older woman sat in a car without addressing reporters or giving her name, but Korobkov wanted people to know about her husband, Alexei, 24, who so much loved the navy.

She held his photograph high, then picked up Lena, pressing the girl to her chest, kissing her, the tears washing down her cheeks.

Korobkov still spoke of her husband in the present tense, like many other relatives of crewmen sitting out the desperate wait in Vidyayevo.

“My daughter loves her papa so badly. She always picks up the phone and pretends she is talking to him,” she said.

The families are angry with the Russian navy for failing to reach the men trapped in the heavily damaged submarine.

“Of course we made mistakes, that’s for sure. But you don’t make any mistakes if you do nothing,” said Capt. Alexander Fedosov of Vidyayevo, whose task was to meet relatives at the Murmansk station and bus them to the base.

A colleague, Mikhail Shilov, also a naval captain from the base, said only a few of the families of the crew had given up hope.

Residents said the streets were nearly empty in Vidyayevo, a closed military town full of shabby apartment blocks, impossible to enter without a special pass. They said an ambulance had been racing from one end of town to the other, offering help to grief-stricken families. Two grieving women had been hospitalized.

“There are a lot of people with red eyes from crying,” said Elina Gorelov, the wife of an officer. She said that everyone in the town knows one another and that the survivors--such as her husband, Oleg--were feeling guilty.

“Everyone’s crying. There is sorrow in the air. Everyone has chosen his own method of fighting the grief. Women cry, and men either clench their teeth and take the pain or take to the bottle,” she said.

There are no churches on the base, only a prayer hall. The services on Sunday were full, as priests intoned prayers for the lives of the crew and worshipers wiped the tears from their faces.

Gorelov said many of the relatives were in denial about the likelihood that the entire crew was dead.

“They know that the crew is dead with their brains, but their hearts refuse to believe it,” she said. “But in fact it has become absolutely clear what happened. And no one dares to take this hope away from these people.”

She added that no one felt like going out into the streets or phoning friends.

“It is literally excruciating to meet people whose husbands are still inside the submarine,” she said.

One of the mourners at the services Sunday was Anatoly Safonov, a former submariner who had already abandoned hope because he knew that his son, Maxim, would have been in the third compartment of the submarine--one of the badly damaged sections.

“Why did my son have to die? I just don’t understand it,” he said.

His wife, Lyudmila, who had not given up, pulled out a photograph.

“He’s as thin as a shoelace, but he gets so much pleasure from what he does,” she said. The couple had traveled to Vidyayevo from their home in Gorky, about 20 miles from Moscow.

Navy Capt. Shilov said that government decisions made in the early 1990s, starving the navy of money, laid the foundation for the failed Russian rescue effort.

“Unfortunately, all the reforms the navy went through in the past years came down to cutting the navy short,” he said, citing the lack of qualified deep-sea divers as one major problem in the rescue operation.

In a break between meeting trains bringing relatives to Murmansk, Shilov visited St. Nicholas Cathedral to say a prayer and light a candle for the crew.

Residents said people were crowded around television sets in the town, where on Sunday evening the first film of the submarine’s damaged hatch was aired.

Other people crowded in and around the local officers’ club, in search of the latest information.

“It’s a very depressing atmosphere. There’s no one around. Everybody is in sorrow,” said resident Alexander Muravyov, 26.

Shilov said the town had come together to offer comfort and support to grieving families. Psychologists were on hand to counsel relatives of the crew.

“It’s easier for the wives of the submariners than it is for us to find the right words to help the people survive and get through this period of waiting,” he said.

The priest at St. Nicholas, Father Andrei Amelin, is a former navy captain who later turned to the priesthood.

“When a military man takes an oath, he should be ready to sacrifice his life. There is no greater manifestation of love than to sacrifice your life for the motherland,” he said.

“These people, who died in such a terrible way, will go straight into God’s embrace,” he said.

*

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Moscow and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.