THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973In May 2001, about a year after Putin was first elected president, a leading
Russian literary weekly published an unusual text entitled “Dust over the Suez
Canal.” This was one of the first examples of veterans turning from documentation
to “fiction.” It also dealt with a chapter that the copious veterans’ literature had
almost entirely sidestepped: the long-denied direct and active role of the Soviet
military not only in preparing but finally in implementing Eg ypt’s cross-canal
offensive. “Dust” was exceptional also in respect of its author’s rank and renown.
He was Maj.-Gen. (retired) Viktor Kutsenko, “who has already published in these
pages materials about Afghanistan”—where he served for three years as the revered
commander of engineers.
Kutsenko gained fame afterward as “the singing general”: a guitar-strumming bard
performing his own protest songs, as well as a talented painter dedicated to protesting
the Afgantsy’s plight and supporting their struggle by depicting the horrors of the war.
“But,” the newspaper now added, “only recently we learned that Kutsenko was also a
witness, and to some degree a participant, of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. The general
has written a story about it—a story, not a documentary study.” The author himself
explained that even if he could still be held to the pledge of secrecy that he signed at
the time, “how can counter-intelligence press charges against a fictitious story?!”^6
What factual credibility can be attached to Kutsenko’s account, which is vividly
narrated in the third person about a “Col. Vasily Bodrov?” Besides the editors’ note,
there were at first only vague hints that Kutsenko had been in Eg ypt. A decorated
hero, he was eminently respectable, with a sterling record of fearless struggle for truth.
His formal biography left a gaping blank between 1965 and 1980, mentioning only
that he “took part in the conflict in Eg ypt”—but this was put in red letters to indicate
combat, like his subsequent service in Afghanistan.^7 After he died in 2008, a eulog y
in the official army newspaper added that the record of “this gifted military engineer”
included “throwing bridges across water obstacles in Eg ypt, which aided the success
of the Eg yptian army during Arab–Israeli hostilities.”^8
That still might be construed as referring to practice exercises in training grounds
such as Wadi Natrun, leaving room for doubt whether “Bodrov’s” role in the actual
canal crossing was by way of eyewitness testimony. But in 2013, someone posted on
YouTube an old amateur video of a “concert” that was held in 1992, at the height
of post-Soviet latitude, to celebrate Kutsenko’s sixtieth birthday. It was mostly
devoted to his songs about Afghanistan, but toward the end his former commander
took the floor to say: “not all of you know that Viktor Pavlovich first experienced
the whistle of bullets, the blast of shells and shrapnel” as early as the Middle East
of the ’60s and ’70s. “He did not observe the events from the sidelines, but took a
direct part”—among other actions, “in overcoming a water obstacle and storming
enemy fortifications that had been considered impregnable.”^9 So Kutsenko had to
be taken literally when, two years after “Dust” appeared, he told the house maga-
zine of his civilian employer that before Afghanistan, in Eg ypt too “I never put