FOREWORDxxviii
ably critical—even discounting for the benefit of hindsight. Often this is explained
by the officers’ subsequent careers: whether they remained in uniform and how high
they eventually rose. As another yardstick, diaries that were written at the time (in
violation of explicit orders) rate higher on the credibility scale than recollections that
were recorded decades later. But all these measures defy precise definition and had to
be adapted to each individual case; sometimes the decisive hurdle was a sense, refined
by experience, of whether a narrative had “the ring of truth.”
We then verified and complemented these post-Soviet sources by means of inter-
views and/or correspondence whenever possible, and compared them with whatever
documentary record that emerge from Soviet archives. Next, we cross-checked them
against official Israeli and US statements, military and intelligence documents, and
similar alternative sources. There are parallels to the Soviet veterans’ literature on the
Israeli side as well: privately issued personal memoirs and memorial publications
initiated by various military formations, often compiled, written or edited by noted
authors. Although subject in theory to military censorship and often even published
by the Defense Ministry, these first-hand testimonies feature a surprising number of
deviations from the official account.
Likewise—though less often relevant to the present topic—the websites of US
veterans from various units in the Mediterranean and Middle East, while usually
limited to travelogues and descriptions of everyday service and off-duty adventures,
occasionally give away operational information that has otherwise never been
released. Since Arab archives remain inaccessible and memoirs by anyone below
senior-officer status are nonexistent, we had to rely for comparison with the Soviet
versions mainly on Eg yptian documents captured by Israeli forces in “Africa” (west of
the Suez Canal) in 1973.
In sum, the veterans’ literature not only provided the human dimension and color
that is usually associated with oral history; it enabled—indeed, demanded—our afore-
mentioned challenges to the most established assumptions about the overall dateline
and contours of the Soviet role. The extent of this innovation is exemplified by the
absence, in any Western research before ours, of the Soviet codename for the massive
intervention in Eg ypt, Operation Kavkaz.^51 Like the identity of its architect
Lashchenko, this term was never so much as mentioned even in such Western intelli-
gence reports as have so far come to light. In respect of the Yom Kippur War, too,
Vladislav Zubok’s authoritative Cold War history acknowledges that “the Soviet role in
this war has long been the subject of great controversy. Today, this story can be analyzed
with much more clarity, thanks to the recollections of ex-Soviet veterans.”^52
F. Putin’s Russia: back to the USSR—for historians, too
What we call the “golden age” of the veterans’ literature (c.1988–2003) did not
endure for long. Under Vladimir Putin, a profound reversal began in respect of dis-