WITHDRAWN REGULARS CONCEAL “BANISHED” ADVISERSB. The zenitchiki’s actual departure
The air defense division, which actually accounted for most of the repatriated Soviet
personnel, left only gradually. A third round of deployment, headed by Maj.-Gen.
Nikolay Rytov, theoretically took over from SAM division chief Boshnyak in June,
which appears to indicate preparation for the regulars to stay for at least another year.
But unlike his predecessors, Rytov was not replaced at his former command (the 19th
Air Defense Division, a post he had held from 1966), and he returned there in
August 1972, to remain through 1975. This division’s highly detailed history on the
8th Air Defense Corps’ veterans’ website does not so much as mention Rytov’s brief
mission in Eg ypt.^14
A photo contributed to the history web page of Kavkaz’s 18th Division by
Rytov’s family shows the general addressing a parade of regulars at an unspecified
desert location, on the morning of Sadat’s announcement, 18 July 1972. But there
is no other record there or elsewhere of Rytov’s activity in Eg ypt, and little about
new manpower that came with him.^15 His dispatch appears, then, to have been
intentionally temporary, and possibly even part of the effort to create an illusion
that it was unexpectedly terminated. An exceptional account by Lt Semen
Luk’yanov, of a technical support unit serving two SAM-3 divizyons near Mersa
Matruh, describes his dispatch among 400 air defense personnel on board the liner
Rossiya in May 1972 but adds that many of their functions on the ground had
already been transferred to Arabs.^16
In fact, the second round’s planned tour of duty had been extended, apparently in
order to avoid sending another full complement of Soviet replacements and to enable
a handover to Eg yptians instead. This was already in progress when Rytov arrived—as
already noted in respect of the fighter squadrons. In the SAM units, the troops’ nor-
mal rotation order was routinely staggered, and this was maintained in the summer
of ’72. Col. Linkov’s divizyon served in Eg ypt for well over a year. The first half of its
manpower returned to Sevastopol on the Rossiya on 3 June. On this voyage or
another one in June, the liner also took the entire Strela platoon of the SAM divizyon
protecting Helwan, after its men were rousted out at 2 a.m. and informed they were
going home.^17 The rest of Linkov’s outfit was flown out to Kiev by An-22s on
3 August, leaving all its weaponry behind.^18
In some cases, the order of evacuation was apparently determined by the visibility
factor: “the Soviet forces deployed around Cairo were withdrawn within 24 hours,”
but one brigade—apparently the first—shipped out of Alexandria only on 31 July,
after being bivouacked for some time on the local university campus:
On the evening of 30 July the men were playing cards as usual when the ship [the liner
Pobeda] arrived. The Arabs allotted 15 trucks and transported all the brigade’s manpower
in two rounds. The men brought along only their personal weapons. The Eg yptian leader-
ship had barred the complexes [hardware] of 22 Pechora [SAM-3] divizyons from leaving
[or so the head of the missile-experts delegation, Nikiforov, was told].