Word: kolesnikov
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Besides the newsworthy revelation of Lieut. Captain Dimitri Kolesnikov's dying message to his wife recovered last week from the husk of the sunken submarine Kursk--that 23 of the 118 crewmen had survived in an isolated chamber for a while, in contradiction to claims by Russian officials that all had perished within minutes of the accident--there was the matter of writing the message in the first place...
...What Kolesnikov did in deciding to describe his position and entrapment, others have also done--in states of repose or terror. When a JAL airliner went down in 1985, passengers used the long minutes of its terrible, spiraling descent to write letters to loved ones. When the last occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto had finally seen their families and companions die of disease or starvation, or be carried off in trucks to extermination camps, and there could be no doubt of their own fate, still they took scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, thoughts, fragments of lives, rolled...
...they bother? With no countervailing news from the outside world, they assumed the Nazis had inherited the earth; that if anyone discovered their writings, it would be their killers, who would snicker and toss them away. They wrote because, like Kolesnikov, they had to. The impulse was in them, like a biological fact...
...this freedom to break the silence, even of death, even when--in the depths of our darkest loneliness--we have no clear idea of why we reach out to one another with these frail, perishable chains of words. In the black chamber of the submarine, Kolesnikov noted, "I am writing blindly." Like everyone else...
...Kolesnikov, the Defense Ministry source said, seemed particularly concerned about the danger of economic collapse. Other senior officials share this anxiety. The outspoken Lebed has warned publicly of an economic crisis coming later this year, triggered partly by Russia's tax-revenue problems--only 60% of taxes are being collected--and partly by serious problems in the nation's banking sector...