The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967–1973. The USSR’s Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict

SAM SUCCESSES AND A MIG DEBACLE

sions at him—to the effect of “you bastard, we who have come all the way here stay at our

stations, and you run away?” ... There was not a single instance where one of ours gave in

to fear.^37

Divizyon commander Konstantin Popov, who had taken up “ambush” positions at
the same time as Tolokonikov, was among the next to see action: “On 29 July I was
ordered: on 31 July, lay the ambush ... there was a Party-Komsomol assembly, in
which 100% of the communists and most Komsomol members declared they were
ready to carry out the combat mission.”^38 This commitment was more than merely
feigned for the benefit of party minders. Throughout their deployment, “bards”
among the advisers and regulars alike composed and performed songs celebrating
their mission, which were even applauded by Israeli soldiers when blared by loud-
speaker across the canal:

Here the firing is no warning shot

A military storm is thundering.

From under the yellow Arab helmet

Gleam blue Russian eyes.

Imagine us for a moment

Marching under a rain of steel:

How for a few Eg yptian pounds

We risk our very heads.^39

Indeed, it was sometimes the Soviet political officers who, as they later admitted,
were dismayed by the disparity between the servicemen’s dedication and Moscow’s
official position, and did their best to hide it from the men. “Judging by the state-
ments of the [Soviet] press, radio and television we weren’t there at all,” the politruk
(political officer) Logachev lamented:

Once, in the midst of our battles against the Israeli Air Force, here comes the latest edition

of Pravda with a front-page editorial headlined “falsifiers.” It’s all about the bourgeois liars

and their claims that Soviet soldiers are stationed in Eg ypt, heatedly demolishing all the

western arguments—obviously aimed at people who didn’t know the truth. But how was

I to explain to the soldiers that ... the main organ of the CP Central Committee was, to

put it mildly, not telling the truth? On my own authority, I burned all fifty copies.

But even in this 1998 memoir, which could have appeared only under the relatively
freewheeling, anti-Soviet spirit of the time, Logachev maintained the other Soviet
canard whereby “nearly all the Israeli pilots had combat experience in Vietnam.”^40 It
was repeated by Maj.-Gen. Aleksandr Bezhevets, an ace pilot and Hero of the Soviet
Union (HSU), as late as 2007.^41
In the summer of 1971, the zenitchiki were told that their success had so intimi-
dated the IAF “mercenaries” that the latter “began refusing to go up, even when