FOREWORDxxx
Second World War, and thus received some positive notices in the West and Israel as
a measure against Holocaust denial.^61 But the law actually applies the prohibition to
any “reports ... that express disrespect for society, or public profanation of symbols of
Russian military glory.”^62
The veterans had already got the message. Their organized activity continued—the
Moscow Council of Veterans of the War in Eg ypt held a public celebration of its
twenty-fifth anniversary in January 2014.^63 But in retelling their memories, caution
now dictated a change. The overall number of overtly factual accounts appears to have
declined, but the change in their character and thrust is often a matter of nuance and
cumulative effect. The pledges of secrecy that the servicemen were required to sign
had been largely disregarded as inoperative since the demise of the USSR. Now, as
one of the earliest and most outspoken among them wrote as early as 2001, this again
became a concern: “In 1973, I gave a written commitment to the state security organs
that I would never divulge their involvement in those events. Who knows, maybe
that signature of mine is still binding.”^64
The transition is most starkly exemplified by a tendency to abandon documentary
publications altogether in favor of supposed fiction: stories, novellas and full-length
novels that can always be disavowed as imaginary. On the one hand, this enabled the
authors to feature some of the most startling claims and to deal with events and areas
that remained off limits even at the height of the “golden age.” On the other hand, it
posed a methodological question: How far can a text be trusted as a historiographical
source if its author will not or cannot affirm its authenticity? The criteria that we had
employed for the veterans’ memoirs had to be applied with greater rigor, but even
under such scrutiny this “fiction” did yield some significant disclosures that had never
appeared before.
As in the earlier phase of documentary publications, an outsize role in the new
genre of supposed fiction (and in the following pages) was played by the former mili-
tary interpreters, who according to their professional supervisor at the peak of Soviet
involvement in Eg ypt numbered up to 1,000 at a time.^65 Many of them
“got to sniff the smell of gunpowder.” It was said that injured students, and even dead ones,
were sent back from Eg ypt ... the sad part was that none of these “interns,” who fulfilled
their “internationalist duty,” was credited for this mission even as part of their military
service—let alone [nominated] for decorations—nor received any documentation that
they had fulfilled this duty in Eg ypt.^66Resentment that they were denied even the combatants’ limited recognition added
to these linguists’ motivation to tell their stories. The alumni club of the Military
School of Languages even started a competition for “amusing and edifying narra-
tives.”^67 As they were drawn from military and civilian academies, the interpreters had
both better training and stronger inclination to write than other servicemen, espe-
cially after many of them resumed their careers in academe, journalism or related