The fate of the sunken submarine Kursk has transfixed this sprawling nation, with Russians glued to television news reports at all hours and heads turning in supermarkets to catch radio dispatches.
Although short on hard facts, news accounts of the disaster have been strikingly open for Russia, where all news was strictly censored in Soviet times. And the country has hungrily tuned in.
Anxious Russian news presenters give hourly updates on the work of rescue capsules working at the site, and often sound desperate as they describe failures to reach an emergency hatch and the 118 sailors trapped inside since last weekend.
Fear for the lives of the servicemen on the Kursk have for a time overshadowed the country's other calamities, including the war in Chechnya, and the plight of the submarine hits home for many families who have sons or husbands in the military.
"The whole country is on edge over this thing. It's terrible, imagine dying that way," said Mr Vladimir Solyunov, a security guard working in downtown Moscow.
Some family members of men on the Kursk learned about the accident from television, and have remained gripped by the reports since.
The face of navy spokesman Capt Igor Dygalo, who has appeared live on several broadcasts on all three major networks every day all week, is now familiar to millions of Russians.
Newspapers dedicated pages to competing theories about why the massive submarine crashed into the sea bottom above the Arctic Circle. Former submarine officers, submarine designers and diving experts have given countless interviews speculating on what happened and how the rescue effort is proceeding.
"The thread connecting the crew of the stricken submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea with the world is becoming ever thinner. Any moment it could tear," began an account of the accident in the popular Moscow daily Vremya.
Many wondered why the military waited several days before asking for help from Western countries. Mr Solyunov said he was shocked to learn a British mini-submarine left a harbour in Norway for the accident site only on Thursday afternoon. Mr Solyunov looked at his watch, drew deeply on a cigarette and began working out how long it would take for the submersible to arrive at the scene of the disaster.