FOREWORDxxvi
his destiny included another, unknown page: participation in the Eg yptian conflict,
which no one ever mentioned. The internationalist soldiers ... found themselves com-
pletely forgotten. To prevent this injustice from happening again, many [such] officers
rallied to defend the rights and interests of the Afgantsy combatants. Among them was
our general.^45The mass of long-discharged Middle East “internationalists,” which followed the
example of the younger and even more numerous Afgantsy, mounted an organized
struggle for their rights. Clubs and councils of Middle Eastern veterans sprang up in
major urban centers, and a main channel for promoting their cause was to retell, and
in effect unveil for the first time, their battlefield experience. This was enabled by the
other prevailing winds that created a second perfect storm. One was the relaxation of
censorship, surveillance and enforcement in the interregnum. Another was the pre-
vailing Zeitgeist to pillory the communist regime as both criminal and antithetical to
the authentic Russian spirit, which peaked in the Yeltsin administration’s drive to
outlaw the Communist Party. A third contributing factor was the advent and rapid
spread of the Internet in Russia.
As a result, an extensive literature flourished and persisted even after one of the
original purposes—recognition as combat veterans—was achieved, at least in theory,
on 16 December 1994. The State Duma (lower house of parliament) then amended
the “Federal Law on Veterans” to recognize as combat veterans participants in forty-
six “local” military conflicts in various countries, including Eg ypt.^46
However, proving one’s eligibility was problematic, as the veterans’ own papers
provided no evidence. Although the Soviet presence in Eg ypt was too big and active
to conceal entirely, US reluctance to decry it and pressure on Israel not to do so
helped Moscow to keep up the pretense that it was limited to a few advisers. Even
after the 1994 law, obtaining confirmation from military archives was difficult when
at all possible—especially for those who now resided in the non-Russian republics of
the former USSR.^47 In 2006, even a retired officer in Russia was still trying to claim
“the financial allowance” he deserved for service in the Middle East.^48
So the veterans’ struggle continued, and their literature appeared in a variety of
genres and media. The veterans’ clubs, in the main cities and provincial towns, initi-
ated and sponsored the publication of newsletters, monographs and book-size
anthologies. A panoply of websites appeared, sponsored by the veterans themselves
or their branches of the Russian armed forces. These were dedicated to memorializing
the dead, as well as conserving the survivors’ memoirs, backed up with photos and
documents from their private scrapbooks. A quintessentially Soviet tradition was
perpetuated by “bards” who composed and sang their own ballads to express both
sentiment and protest:
No one knew, nor knows till now
About the awful heat and scorching sands;