THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973Most previous accounts of the Soviet Union’s response to the Arab rout assumed
that Moscow had been surprised not only by its allies’ defeat but by the very escala-
tion of the crisis in May 1967 into full-scale war. Although it was widely accepted
that a false Soviet warning of Israeli troop concentrations ignited the crisis, this was
held to have been a routine disinformation exercise that got out of hand. But the
comparisons that within days became ubiquitous in the Soviet media, between the
Israeli attack and the Nazi onslaught on the USSR, appear to have bespoken more
than mere propaganda. For the politicians and generals who had been commanders
or commissars during “the Great Patriotic War” and the mid-ranking officers who had
been young soldiers, the impact of the Eg yptian fiasco was evocative and emotional.
This comparison reflected an almost-instinctive Soviet response to regroup and coun-
terattack, as a linear continuation of the June war rather than a new and distinct
chapter. As a future commander of Soviet fighter pilots in Eg ypt recalled, “everyone
was waiting for what was to come next ... Far-sighted commanders understood this
was to be continued.”^3
Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov had played a key role in the run-up
to the Six-Day War. When it began on 5 June, he was summoned to a Politburo
meeting that lasted till 3 a.m. He recorded in his diary that “SOS signals coming in
from Cairo” were “both tragic and comic. The first days of war in the Soviet Union,
1941, were repeating themselves.”^4 Air Force Maj.-Gen. Aleksandr Vybornov had
been sent to Eg ypt before the war to study the feasibility of Soviet air intervention.^5
The scene he witnessed at an Eg yptian airbase under Israeli attack “reminded him of
the Russian defense of Moscow in 1941.”^6 Sympathy for the Eg yptians’ plight was
partly due to the Soviets’ sad memories of their own country’s unpreparedness:
Vybornov was struck by the “utter chaos,” Semenov by “the illiterate Eg yptian peas-
ants, who were incapable of mastering technolog y and scattered at the sound of the
first shot.” Veiled equation of Israel with Nazi Germany by means of code words like
“treacherous attack” soon gave way to explicit comparisons in the official press.^7
Newspaper editors were reprimanded for running photos of a medallion struck in
Germany with Moshe Dayan’s portrait, or of an admiring Danish actress wearing the
Israeli defense minister’s trademark eyepatch.^8 Recriminations were rife in the
CPSU’s own rank-and-file and even within the Soviet leadership. As Ukrainian
Communist Party leader Petro Shelest noted in his diary, “everyone is in a kind of
depressed state. ... there was confusion, apprehension, and uncertainty.”^9
B. The airlift creates new definitions for Soviet military presence
The Soviets’ war experience and doctrinal preconditioning disposed them to expect
that Israel would maximize its triumph by resuming air attacks, ground advances or
both across the Suez Canal. This dictated an immediate response to prevent an even
worse debacle. The first manifestation of Soviet resolve to up the ante in Eg ypt—the