30. In the Thick of the Yom Kippur War
A. The singing general’s canal crossing
In 1988, Lt-Gen. and Hero of the Soviet Union Anatoly Pushkin, president of the
Interregional Association of Internationalist Soldiers, greeted the conference of
Soviet and Eg yptian veterans to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Yom Kippur
war. He recognized in the audience “direct participants in the events of October
- ... The Soviet military contingent—advisers and experts, independent operative
groups, technical and armaments [specialists] took an active part in the October epic.
We join in tribute to these participants. ... Their combat experience is still relevant
t o d a y.”^1 The following year, the manpower chief of the Soviet Army published an
article in its official organ to honor soldiers who had taken part in “combat opera-
tions abroad.” He listed “Eg ypt, 5 October 1973–1 April 1974” as one such opera-
tion.^2 “The grandson of a Soviet admiral” declared in 2004, referring to the Yom
Kippur War: “no less than 5,000 Soviet military advisers took part in the operation
itself. Of these, 1,500 took part in combat, especially pilots and anti-aircraft defense
experts.”^3 This is the only source for such figures, but multiple testimonies from indi-
vidual participants bear out his general claim.
Giving 5 October as the start of Soviet combat operations in Eg ypt, rather than
the 6th when hostilities actually began, is hardly coincidental. It took until
10 October for any Western assessment even to speculate that the Soviet airliners
presumed to have been sent to fetch Soviet nationals from Eg ypt and Syria did not
go there empty, but carried hardware deliveries of some kind.^4 Preoccupied with the
meaning of the Soviet dependents’ departure, no one in Israeli and Western intelli-
gence is recorded as asking whether there were any incoming passengers. It would
take almost thirty years to reveal that far from removing Soviet personnel from the
war zone, the planes actually brought in a fresh contingent just before the Arab offen-
sive was unleashed—that is, when Moscow was admittedly aware of it. The recurring
Israeli denial, true or not, that the IDF encountered a single Soviet adviser on the
battlefield does not reflect the extent of their activity.^5