THE SOVIET REGULARS MOVE INheadquarters of the Eg yptian II Army Corps at Tel el-Kebir. This was only about 35
kilometers from the canal; whereas the new “depth targets” were tackled exclusively
by Phantoms, this one was attacked by the shorter-range Skyhawks, which together
with older IAF craft continued the intensive bombing of the canal line simultane-
ously with the deep-penetration raids.^52 Tel el-Kebir was no new target; a Soviet
adviser had died there in a previous Israeli “flying artillery” raid, among the significant
Soviet casualties during the summer.^53
Closer to the front at 2nd Division headquarters in Ismailia, Gorbunov dates the
first Soviet casualties to 1969, when the IAF bombardments obliged the Soviet advis-
ers and interpreters on the canal front to “take part in combat operations.” During
one artillery exchange, their chief Afanas’ev’s foresight in changing positions saved
their group from a direct hit, but on other occasions “fatalities and injuries occurred.
Our wives stayed with the bereaved womenfolk” at their Cairo hotel billets.^54 An
anti-ship missile specialist, Viktor Vasilenko of the Northern Fleet, who was sent to
Alexandria in December 1969, recalls seeing “numerous” posthumous citations for
advisers who had already lost their lives, “and I understood there was a real war going
on there.”^55 On 4 November 1969, while Kryshtob was waiting to leave for Eg ypt, he
encountered at his Moscow hotel the widow of an air defense adviser killed about a
week earlier. He was asked to contribute to a collection for her travel expenses to
Eg ypt. “I learned afterward that this was usual for the period ... at the outset, we had
to bury our dead at our own expense. Special funding for keeping the bodies in
Eg yptian morgues, obtaining coffins and transportation to the Soviet Union had not
been foreseen by the General Staff.” Ultimately, “because of the large number of
fatalities ... the problem came into the open,” and after repeated protests, this “dis-
grace” ended.^56
Still, as Kavkaz continued, at least some of the casualties among enlisted men were
buried where they died in Eg ypt; their families were informed only that they had
“fallen in the course of duty,” and received no financial benefits.^57 At least some of the
Soviet missilemen who won Eg yptian bounties for shooting down IAF planes
donated the money to the bereaved families of their comrades.^58 Moscow’s callous
attitude toward these casualties hardly bespoke genuine alarm or outrage. A mono-
graph on the subject twenty years later found that “the Soviets are less ready to toler-
ate massive sacrifices than has hitherto been supposed,” but admitted that “this posi-
tion stems as much from utilitarian-military logic as from any altruistic compassion.”
If indeed it was Soviet losses in Eg ypt that precipitated the Soviet intervention, it was
because they represented a military setback rather than a human tragedy.^59 These
casualties began much earlier, and reached significant proportions later, than the first
“depth bombings” or Nasser’s purported appeal.
If not in Moscow, the losses on 28 January definitely caused some shock among the
advisers. Gennady Goryachkin, a military interpreter who was posted to Eg ypt in
August 1969, was attached in January to the advisers of an Eg yptian mechanized