4 Days After, Hopes for Survivors of Slide in Southern Russia Dwindling

Four days after a huge piece of glacier broke off and went hurtling down a mountainside, crushing trees, boulders and buildings, hope faded Tuesday for more than 100 people still missing, among them one of the most idolized of post-Soviet Russia’s new generation of movie stars.

Director Sergei Bodrov flew to the North Ossetia region of the Caucasus Mountains hoping for word of his 30-year-old son, also named Sergei, who was working on a new movie when disaster struck late Friday.

The younger Bodrov achieved cinematic success in the Academy Award-nominated “Prisoner of the Mountains” and in two crime thrillers that captured the cynical flavor of 1990s Russia. He had not been heard of since Friday, nor had any of the 49 members of the film crew who were with him on the slopes of 16,541-foot Mt. Kazbek.

“It has been four days since the tragedy, and the chances that anyone else will be found alive are very slim [and] becoming slimmer and slimmer every hour,” said Irina Andrianova, spokeswoman for Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry in Moscow.

“Only those who managed to hide have a chance,” she said. “Those who were caught in the mudslide itself and are now under ice have no chance to survive at all.”

“The figures currently stand at nine dead, 31 rescued and more than a hundred missing,” Vladimir Skripak of the search and rescue service in the republic of North Ossetia said by telephone.

“The conditions in which our rescue teams have to work are horrible,” he added. “How are they expected to find a hundred people buried somewhere in the midst of 20 million tons of ice that is mixed with rock and mud? Almost impossible!”

Andrianova said rescue workers were wading in icy water hip deep, looking for any signs of life. Debris from the avalanche is sometimes 100 yards deep, she said, making it impossible to imagine anyone surviving. Even dogs had not been able to detect anything under the thick blanket of ice and mud.

The calamity stunned residents, who say that such an avalanche also took place 100 years ago. Authorities have speculated that global warming might have played a role in destabilizing the glacier.

From the summit to its resting place in the valley six miles outside the regional center of Vladikavkaz, the glacial mass careered more than 20 miles downhill, cutting a swath about 1,000 feet wide.

Emergencies Minister Sergei K. Shoigu arrived in the region to take a firsthand look at the devastation, accompanying the elder Bodrov and his wife.

The only known survivors from the film crew are two members who happened to leave the area just before the glacier broke apart.

Fellow actor and director Fyodor Bondarchuk, 35, said he considered the younger Bodrov the first cinematic hero to emerge after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“He is the new hero of our time, the person who this country had been waiting for. And he already is a legend in Russian cinema,” said Bondarchuk, who said he was clinging to hope that the dark-haired, boyish-looking Bodrov would be found alive.

Two late-1990s action movies, “Brother” and “Brother II,” solidified Bodrov’s popularity with Russian moviegoers. He played an embittered army veteran who metes out violent retribution in an unjust, criminal-infested Russia.

“Both films are about a person who takes it upon himself to dispense justice,” Bondarchuk said. “He is the law, and he is forced to do that in a land of lawlessness. It was something that many Russian people found very familiar, with so much disorder and lawlessness in Russia today.”

Directed by his father in 1996 in “Prisoner of the Mountains” (called “Prisoner of the Caucasus” in Russian), Bodrov played a soldier who embodied and suffered the bitter war experience of normal Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya. It has been rare for Russian cinema to address the Chechen war so honestly, Bondarchuk said.

“Bodrov represents the generation of people 25 to 30 now,” he said. “To many, he is the guy around the corner--someone recognizable as their neighbor, friend or relative.... I do not even want to think about what a huge loss Sergei’s death would be.”