FOREWORDxviii
ture. To cite one telling example: in the 1967 crisis, when the hotline to Washington
was first used, it was Premier Alexey Kosygin, the formal counterpart of US President
Lyndon Johnson as head of government, who signed the Soviet messages, even if they
were formulated in the Brezhnev-dominated Politburo. This was still the case in
January 1970, when Kosygin issued the threat of direct Soviet intervention. But by
the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, this pretense was dropped:
though both Soviet leaders still held the same titles, it was Brezhnev who signed the
hotline messages to President Richard Nixon.
Again, to explain seeming inconsistencies, a dualistic harmonization has been
offered. The same analysis of Brezhnev’s leadership can describe him on one page as
“completely in charge,” “at the height of his powers,” and on the next as “disorga-
nized,” “blowing with the wind” and exhibiting “a shambles” of a decision-making
process.^19 Some key stages in Brezhnev’s ascendancy and his defeat of challenges
within the Party indeed paralleled developments in the Middle East (such as the
CPSU Central Committee plenum of 20 June 1967). But these processes had at most
a marginal effect on shaping Soviet action in the region, which was determined by
Brezhnev and his allies before and outside the formal Party organs’ convocations that
ratified it. As David Kimche perceptively put it in an exceptional analysis twenty-five
years ago, the War of Attrition was first and foremost “Brezhnev’s War.”^20
We did discern marked variance in the effectiveness and style of implementation that
stemmed from differing levels of competence and charisma among Soviet officers and
diplomats. Though these had a significant effect on the outcome of Soviet activity, they
were completely overshadowed in previous historiography (and in such intelligence
reports as have come to light) by concentration on the top political echelon. Try, for
instance, to google “Petr Lashchenko”—one of those whose very names, not to mention
their momentous input, will be presented here for the first time to the Western reader.
In this as in the other aspects just discussed, this book does not presume to create a new
reading of history, but rather to restore the scriptio inferior, the underlying content that
has been obscured in a heavily overwritten palimpsest.
II. THE TYRANNY OF VESTED-INTEREST SOURCESA. Exclusivity of open sources in contemporary historiography
By this point, the reader must be asking : If the present authors are right, how could
generations of analysts and historians have been so wrong? For us, too, our research
has provided insights on how the accepted accounts were created and established,
which was no less intriguing than setting the factual record straight. These two
strands are intertwined throughout this book.
Ideological slant, political correctness or sloppy scholarship can occasionally offer a
very partial explanation for unfounded claims that became nearly unassailable axioms.