Anton Chekhov said that people have to squeeze the slave from themselves painfully, drop by drop. Everything in the Kursk disaster – the search for explanations and the operation to retrieve the bodies of the crew – is a drop-by-drop painful parting with imperial ambitions and imperial negligence of soldiers' lives.

At a time when the different branches of the armed forces are fighting each other bitterly for priority funding, the naval command had an excellent opportunity last summer to demonstrate its worth. The Kremlin, predicting a crisis in Yugoslavia, wanted to send a squadron to the Mediterranean to prevent "Western intervention in the domestic affairs" of Yugoslavia.

The maneuvers, in which the Kursk was participating, were supposed to show the U.S. 6th Fleet just what the Russian naval squadron was capable of. The Russian admirals were in such a hurry that they planned training exercises with live firing in shallow waters where the Kursk should not have been sailing. As we now know, the maneuvers took place without safety equipment. Sailors' lives were risked in pursuit of a highly dubious cause.

When disaster did strike, the admirals not only lied, they lied in the best Soviet tradition, as if certain that no one would dare doubt their words. "The submarine ran aground," they said, using the same assured tone as back in 1983 when they said that the South Korean Boeing shot down by a Soviet fighter plane had "gone toward the sea."

A little later, they simply ignored data from the Norwegian seismological institute that showed the exact time of the disaster – 11:30 a.m., Aug. 12. It was more convenient to give the time as 11:30 p.m., the moment when the submarine didn't make contact. This made it look like they located the submarine very quickly, began the rescue operation almost immediately and promptly informed the president.

But the note left by Lt. Capt. Dmitry Kolesnikov confirms the Norwegian data. This raises the question as to what the fleet's command did during the 12 hours after the disaster. There's no believing that dozens of ships and planes in the area where maneuvers were taking place wouldn't have noticed such a powerful explosion. But if they noticed, the command would have had to sound the alarm earlier than it did.

The only logical explanation is that the command knew about what had happened from the beginning, but was unable to help the sailors, who, as even North Sea Fleet commander Adm. Vyacheslav Popov had to admit, were still alive for at least a few hours after the disaster, and maybe were still alive Aug. 13.

The submarine's crew was perhaps still alive when the Kremlin, after consulting with the admirals, turned down initial offers of foreign help. President Vladimir Putin, at least, explained that foreign help was unnecessary as all the sailors had been killed within minutes of the disaster.

Now it's clear that this decision was taken without any accurate information on the situation inside the submarine. This decision could be explained by anything – worries about preserving secrecy, attempts to keep intact the state's prestige, or rather, to keep the admirals in their jobs, but not by a desire to save the sailors' lives.

It's not just chance that now, when these lies have been exposed, the admirals are again saying that the Kursk went down after colliding with a U.S. or British submarine. Naval commander in chief Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov even said that he has 80 percent proof of this version of events. Kuroyedov is deliberately ignoring the data provided by the U.S. government – information on the explosions on board the Kursk as recorded by two U.S. submarines. These records also identify the location of the U.S. submarines.

Kuroyedov likewise ignores the fact that the Mir apparatus used to survey the Kursk's hull found no traces of a foreign submarine. But it's hard to believe that a submarine with a weight of 8-10 tons (like the attack submarines used by the Americans and the British) could have got away without leaving a single piece of its outer cladding after colliding with a 24-ton Russian submarine.

What stands out is that the Russian admirals seem to think that if they can prove the submarine sank after colliding with a NATO submarine, this will automatically lift from them the blame for the crew's death. This is a typically imperial approach – war is war.

But even if collision with a foreign submarine were the cause of the tragedy, this would mean that the naval command let "enemy" submarines slip unnoticed right into the area where maneuvers were going on.

What kind of deterrent can a navy be that doesn't even pick up an enemy submarine? Just holding maneuvers in these conditions starts to look like blatant adventurism or even a criminal act, let alone sending a squadron to the Mediterranean, which is swarming with U.S., British, French and Turkish submarines.

It would seem then that Russian military officials are no different than their former Soviet counterparts. But this isn't quite true. The very fact that the bodies of the Kursk's crew are being brought to the surface is something new in Russian military history. From Suvorov to Zhukov, Russian military commanders were expected to use their soldiers rationally on the battlefield. It's no coincidence that in official documents, the soldiers were designated by the impersonal term "living forces."

But it never occurred to anyone that a commander's duties also included giving his subordinates a decent burial when they stopped being "living" forces. Soviet generals, brought up as atheists, couldn't see the sense in the way the United States didn't give up searching for the bodies of soldiers killed in Korea and Vietnam.

Even in modern Russia, where emphasizing one's religiousness has become the order of the day, the military officials still couldn't understand why they should waste resources on retrieving the bodies of the crew. They pressured Putin to cancel his order, but Putin didn't cancel it.

Now it's clear that bringing up the bodies has also had a practical benefit in that it has shed light on the circumstances of the disaster. Perhaps now some change is going on in the admirals' minds. Perhaps they are beginning to understand that they are responsible not only for carrying out military missions and for the lives of their men, but also for giving them a decent burial.

But this doesn't apply to the generation of officials that include Adm. Kuroyedov and Adm. Popov. Those two men should simply be dismissed from their posts.