Accidents happen. Planes go down. Submarines sink.

But when a system capable of producing billion-dollar war machines cannot pay a few thousand dollars for diving suits or rescue equipment; when men trapped in a submarine at the bottom of an icy sea tap on a hull for help and don't receive any; when half-truths and lies are fed to families, a nation and the world; and when horrendous suffering is for days treated with neglect – then it is clear that a system is rotten to the core. It is also clear that an enormous tragedy has taken place.

And when tragedies of this scale happen, few can remain unaffected.

For more than a week, sailors and submariners around the world saluted and prayed; thousands more people wrote letters to their newspapers or logged on to Internet chat rooms. Even more must have clasped their owns sons, or their pictures, close to them as they prayed for the Kursk's crew.

Yet for much of the time, the Russian president continued his holiday – and virtually none of his ministers bothered to show up at the scene of the tragedy. Russia, whose oceans these submariners patrolled and protected, did not even have the decency to arrange for the crew's families to be transported by plane to the sea beneath which their loved ones were trapped.

True, soon enough, the men of Kursk will be forgotten. Issues such as radioactive fallout and the raising of the submarine will become headlines. Wailing relatives and babbling newspaper editorials will not disturb the presidency of Vladimir Putin; the Kremlin's image-makers will spin something to make up for any fall in the president's ratings.

And those still gripped by the horror of the event will just have to deal with it themselves.

After all, Russian leaders may have greater tasks awaiting them. But that will not excuse them from acting in a way that is reminiscent of their Soviet forebears – an all too likely possibility. Russia's government may not be stained with the same blood as its predecessor's, but its leaders have already exhibited the same crisp efficiency that marked the Soviet way of ignoring such tragedies.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin were but an aberration in the constant rule of such men. Yeltsin, of course, would not have made it to Murmansk. He would have been too sick. But he would have shed a tear and missed a night's sleep – for he was a simple, sincere Russian.

But when the lives of 118 men hang in the balance, it takes foresight, courage, compassion and leadership to rescue them – or to at least make a decent fist of attempting it. It also requires a great deal of empathy to cushion the terrible blow experienced by the families, and indeed the entire nation.

The leadership of Russia failed on each of these counts.

But in a short space of time, the fat incompetent generals, the directors of military industrial complexes and their lobbyists in Moscow will return to their dachas and complete their interrupted holidays. These swindlers serve a system that allows blood to flow because it is too criminal or incompetent to find an alternative; a system with a callous disregard for human life – one that brands as traitors those who dare question its methods.

But they shouldn't forget about the Kursk. The despair of ordinary Russians (and let's be straight, it is their despair) can hardly be consoled. After all, the children of Russia's post-Soviet elite do not serve in Chechnya. They do not go out in submarines beneath the Barents Sea.

As a result, Russia's military and political establishment has no concept of the grief and despair of parents who send their children into war zones or underwater in submarines. Parents who know their sons are nothing more than numbers in the system – less important than the machines they operate.

And while many loving parents can perhaps feel some of the pain of the victims' families, they can not conceive what a Russian parent – already deprived of a decent life – experiences when their son is dragged off to military service. The Kursk is just the latest, and worst, example of the terrible nightmare young Russian men go through – serving their motherland for the indignity of a $50-a-month salary.

But the Kursk tragedy must teach us some lessons – and those lessons and actions must go beyond dropping coins in the bowls of the parents who were deprived of their sons.

The men of the Kursk, and those left behind, must be treated with dignity and respect. A real tribute to the lives ruined – both of the living and the dead – would be for every nut and bolt of the system that is the Russian government to be unscrewed, examined and either cleaned, replaced or discarded.

Further, those who actively deceived or were criminally negligent in the accident must be prosecuted. The inability of the military top brass to get basic facts straight during the Kursk disaster was shameful. What country, what people and whose interests did they think they were serving by lying?

The men of the Kursk are gone now – and it is too awful to ponder what they may have gone through, tapping on the hull and not being answered.

But the full truth must be revealed. Russia must now break with its past. It must reconcile itself with the realities of the present. There can be no more Kursks and no more unprotected convoys of 18-year-old boys blown up in Chechen mountains.

The country owes it to the memory of those submariners to improve the lives of those left behind.