Days into the towering inferno that blanked out Moscow television screens and deprived 10 million Muscovites of their daily soap opera fix, the pinnacle of Europe's tallest structure was wobbling – a cruel symbol of how Russia's once soaring ambitions are tumbling into hubris and humiliation.

The Ostankino television tower, rising 540 meters to dominate the capital's skyline, was until Sunday a monument to Russian power and prestige and hi-tech can-do, just as – until three weeks ago – the Kursk nuclear submarine was seen as a measure of Russia's military prowess.

Gutted by fire and in danger of collapsing into a mangled heap of steel, cable and ferro-concrete, the TV tower made yet another eloquent mockery of President Vladimir Putin's pledges to make Russia great again.

In contrast to his aloof, delayed reaction to the submarine disaster, however, Putin was quick to label the TV tower blaze a metaphor for the state of the nation.

"This emergency highlights the condition of our vital facilities as well as of the entire nation," he declared. "Only economic development will enable us to prevent such calamities in the future."

There are few prouder symbols in Moscow of once-hailed Soviet supremacy and Russian prowess than the Ostankino Tower.

Erected in 1967 at the height of the arms and space race with the United States and to mark the Russian Revolution's birthday, the north-Moscow monument, with its revolving Seventh Heaven restaurant commanding panoramic views of the city, instantly overtook New York's Empire State Building as the world's tallest structure.

That was then. Ten years of post-Soviet meltdown, retreat from empire, mass impoverishment and colossal corruption have turned Russia into a vast accident waiting to happen.

August is habitually Russia's cruelest month, and this year illustrates the rule – a bomb in the heart of Moscow, the sinking of the Kursk, the towering inferno. Last August brought more bombs in the city and the start of the Chechen war. The previous August brought the financial crash. And so on.

But while the submarine sinking convulses Russia with grief and hijacks the world's emotions, and the dramatic pictures of the tower fire dominate the global television screen, the sad fact of contemporary Russia is that disaster has become a drab and daily fixture.

In one day last week, in addition to the Ostankino blaze, there were two booby-trap bombs in Grozny, the Chechen capital, a methane gas explosion at a mine in the Urals, and the bodies of two young conscripts were found north of Moscow. They had just shot themselves after going AWOL from their units.

For the professional catastrophists employed by the government's Ministry of Emergencies come the predictions that endemic bungling, combined with lack of money, will lead to radiation and toxic alerts in the years ahead, as well as air crashes, pipeline ruptures and building collapses.

Last week, the Izvestiya newspaper reported that more than 1,000 servicemen die every year in peacetime accidents.

The military prosecutor's office puts the death toll from training mishaps, exploding ordnance and vehicle crashes at 1,100, though activist mothers campaigning for better conditions for their conscript sons put the figure at triple that. "Natural wastage," the Russian military calls it.

The daily litany of misfortune generates alarmist, populist politics playing on paranoia, conspiracy theories and fear.

In the wake of the Kursk disaster, a "red-brown" group of nationalist and communist politicians, writers and editors issued a manifesto for "national salvation" to combat Russia's "spiritual paralysis and despair."

"In these days of mourning, we are very clearly aware of the scale of the trouble into which Russia has been plunged," they proclaimed.

"Our people have been waging a great war for a decade, losing one million of our population every year, and leaving burning cities, blown-up apartment buildings, crashed airplanes, sunken ships, and devastated, depopulated regions, as well as countless graves of our compatriots behind on the battlefield."

Russia was at "war for the right to call itself Russia, to control the territory between three oceans, to speak its native language, to worship its holy things, and to honour its heroes and forebears ... trying with its last strength to put ships out to sea and squadrons in the air, to pump oil and natural gas, to heat the houses, educate the children, nurse the orphans, and to keep faith in its sovereignty and inviolability, and in the inevitable Russian Victory."

Rather than victory, the current mood is one of demoralized defeatism. Even in the holiday season, dozens of people are committing suicide – picking and eating poison mushrooms or bingeing on vodka and then drowning themselves in Moscow's rivers and lakes.

Putin's appeal to Russians is that he represents to them the best option for fashioning order from this chaos, stability from mayhem. But while he promises a restoration of greatness, he also told the grieving relatives of the Kursk crewmen that Russia had to learn to live within its means.

And while the 118 were entombed in the submarine at the bottom of the Barents Sea, the president debated Russia's brain-drain with prominent scientists and told them that only one in 20 businesses in the country were using modern equipment.

And if Navy manpower and equipment were not up to mounting an effective rescue for the 118 seamen on the Kursk, so the 300 firefighters in northern Moscow struggled to enter the gutted tower in search of survivors.

Some experts said last week that the conflagration had been sparked by negligence and refusals to heed the warnings of specialists. The fire department said that even when first built, the Ostankino tower had failed to satisfy safety regulations.

An inspection in May resulted in it being denied the required safety paperwork since its power supply system was 30 percent overloaded, making the kind of short circuit that occurred on Sunday afternoon virtually inevitable.