We Feel Your Pain.

The loss, the helplessness of the parents/adults, the guilt to come caused by the self-preservation instinct...

You just hope it was a quick ending, and the little ones didn't suffer too much in their final minutes on Earth. I know the Russians love their children too.

On Sunday, the second day of the cruise, the children were gathered after lunch in an indoor play room for games with baby sitters working for the tour company. The fate of the baby sitters is still unclear, though it is likely they also went down with the ship a few minutes before 2 p.m., while many of the parents survived.

The Interfax news agency quoted one survivor saying at least 30 children were in the room. The parents went out on deck, or relaxed in their cabins, survivors said.

At the time, Capt. Aleksandr Ostrovsky — whose family happened to be aboard — was trying to turn the tilting, underpowered boat in the increasingly choppy water of a dammed portion of the Volga River that forms a broad lake, called the Kuybyshev Reservoir.

As he turned, he exposed the boat’s length to waves, the news Web site Life News reported.

One washed over the deck, sweeping some of the adults into the water, and the boat tilted.

“It just tipped to the right, flipped over and sank,” Nikolai Chernov, one of the survivors, told Russian television.

“That was it,” he said. “There was no warning, nothing.”
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Most of those who survived were on the decks, Life News reported.

Some were swept into the water, while others were able to jump in.

Some of those who were indoors as the boat began sinking escaped after harrowing ordeals. Among the survivors picked up by the Arabella were two dozen with lacerations and broken bones — caused by breaking the windows on their cabins and squeezing through, as the boat filled with water.

Even out of the boat, the difficulties continued.

Mr. Chernov, the passenger who described the sinking as swift and without warning, said survivors spent an hour and a half in the water before being picked up.

During that time, two cargo barges passed without stopping, he said, while another survivor told the Russia Today television station that passengers on one passing boat were taking cellphone videos of the people in the water.

Russian television later showed footage of survivors shaking with grief, yelling or staring hollowly at the port in Kazan where they were taken.

In one, a woman yells, “My granddaughter, she was only 5 years old.”

The name of the captain, Mr. Ostrovsky, was not among the list of rescued, and neither were the names of his wife and children, Life News reported.