Kursk: Putin's First Crisis and the Russian Navy's Darkest Hour

The acclaimed and harrowing story of the fate of Russia’s most powerful submarine – now with new material from the author. At 11.28 a.m. on Saturday, 12 August 2000, a massive and mysterious blast punched through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. 135 seconds later, another colossal explosion was detected by seismologists around the globe. The Kursk, pride of Russia’s Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was plunging to the ocean floor, fatally wounded. In Kursk, award-winning television journalist Robert Moore vividly recreates this disaster minute by minute. Venturing into a covert world where the Cold War continues out of sight, Moore investigates the military and political background to the tragedy. But above all, he tells the nail-bitingly poignant human story of the families waiting on shore, of the desperate efforts of the British, Norwegian and Russian rescuers, and of the twenty-three sailors, trapped in the aft compartment of the stricken submarine, waiting for rescue, as a horrified world followed their fight to stay alive…

<@attributes>cite

Colin Firth

<@attributes>cite

Orlando Figes, The Times