The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967–1973

The main purpose of the presented book (according to its authors) was to prove that between the 1967 Six-Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Soviet Union “conducted a direct military campaign against Israel.” Indeed, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez claim that the Soviet Union not only supported Egypt militarily, economically and diplomatically, but also aggressively pushed Egypt into the struggle with Israel and, moreover, that a significant number of Soviet troops in Egypt fought against Israel directly. The authors state that the Soviet “military contingent” located in Egypt reached 20,000 men in the period described here. These military men were not only “advisers” and “instructors” helping the Egyptian army, but also combat troops who participated in battles and suffered considerable casualties.Contrary to the prevailing opinion of historians that Moscow held back Egyptian military advances and tried to reach a political resolution for fear of a direct military confrontation with the United States, Ginor and Remez argue that the policy of the Soviet Union in the Middle East was openly aggressive and as a result pushed Egypt into the struggle with Israel.They also claim that during the 1967 Six-Day War Moscow managed to massively rearm and retrain the Egyptian forces. In addition, the authors maintain that regular Soviet personnel defended the Suez Canal against Israelis in order to give Egyptians the chance to recover, and that Egyptian counteroffensives later in 1967 were taken only with direct Soviet participation.Ginor and Remez also counter that the massive move of the Soviet troops to Egypt did not start after the Israeli bombings of January 1970 and Nasser's secret visit to Moscow; rather, vice versa—the Israeli bombings began as a result of the Soviet military deployment, which occurred immediately after the defeat of 1967 and reached its peak in 1969. The authors try to refute the concept that the ceasefire of August 1970 was reached as a result of Israeli victory and state to the contrary that the ceasefire was due to the superiority of the Soviet forces, which caused the Israeli military serious human and material losses.The view expressed by the authors is very different from that of a vast majority of historians who have dealt with the issue of Soviet participation in the Middle East conflict. Based on the documents that we have today, most historians hold that although the USSR did indeed render Egypt and Syria considerable military assistance with massive supplies of arms and the training of military personnel, the USSR tried to refrain from directly involving the Soviet military in combat operations. There is no doubt that Moscow considered Egypt and Syria as probable adversaries to Israel, which according to Communist doctrine at the time was only a “servant,” a “puppet,” and a “client” of the United States. For this reason, from 1955 until 1967 the USSR (together with the countries of the Warsaw Pact) supplied Cairo and Damascus with military equipment worth more than $1.8 billion. It is also well known that a significant number of Egyptian and Syrian officers were trained in the Soviet Union. At the same time, historians know that the Kremlin tried to manipulate its Arab “allies” in order to create necessary tension in the Middle East. Yet there is a consensus among specialists that during the ongoing Soviet confrontation with the United States in the course of the Cold War the USSR was not prepared for an open military confrontation and tried to avoid such a possibility.This internal tension in Soviet policies can be clearly seen during the Six-Day War of 1967. Moscow passed to Cairo and Damascus information about the concentration of Israeli troops near the Syrian border, which helped trigger Nasser's decision to move troops into the Sinai and to close the Straits. Nevertheless, analysis of existing documents proves that Moscow did not want the war to start, as the Soviet leadership figured their Arab allies would most likely lose the war with Israel. Thus, they only wanted to increase the tension, to push Nasser into Sinai, and to get him credit for it in the Arab world. This was based on two erroneous perceptions. First, they were sincerely mistaken in believing that Nasser would strictly follow instructions from Moscow, and that the Israeli government would in turn execute American directives. Later they found out that they could not control Nasser, while Israel also acted on its own. Their second mistake was their evaluation of the situation, since Moscow did not understand that the Egyptian occupation of Sinai and closure of the Straits alone amounted to a casus belli for Israel. All the existing documents therefore prove that though the Soviet Union did contribute to the outbreak of the Six-Day War, it was most likely done by mistake.This can be proved by two observations. When the situation became critical and Moscow realized that it might lead to a new war, Soviet leadership tried to do its very best to relax the situation and to prevent the war. There are a number of documented sources stating that on May 27 at 3 a.m. the Soviet ambassador in Cairo, Dmitri Pozhidaev, woke Nasser with a message from Moscow containing the instruction to do everything possible to prevent a war. Later, the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, passed a warning to Nasser stating that if Egypt would start the war, the USSR would not support it. According to many sources, this stopped Nasser from attacking. On June 1 Pozhidaev again met with Nasser in order to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. On May 27, at the same time the Soviet ambassador to Israel, Dmitry Chuvakhin, appealed to the Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol with the request not to initiate military operations and to try to prevent the war. Finally, the USSR exerted all possible means in the UN in order to resolve the crisis peacefully. The second observation showing Soviet intentions is the behavior of the Soviet navy squadron, which was present in the Mediterranean Sea during the war. Its maneuvers at the time demonstrated that if the US fleet would restrain from military actions, the Soviets would do the same.Those actions are well documented and refute several claims the authors make in the book. If Moscow had intended to start the war, much less to get involved in it, it would probably have acted much differently. In spite of these facts, Moscow's decision when the war began was to support the Arabs by all possible means, and when the troops of Egypt and Syria suffered a crushing defeat, the Kremlin did its best to stop the fighting and minimize Arab losses. This in fact leaves open the question of how the Egyptian troops could have been retrained during the very short period of war, as the authors claim.In their previous book—Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2007)—Ginor and Remez expressed controversial views using a similar method to the one used here. Namely, in order to prove their above-mentioned statements, the authors rely mainly on the huge number of memoirs of Soviet veterans who participated in the conflict, articles about the Arab-Israeli conflict published in the Russian press after 1991, and quotations from a variety of books (mainly published in Russian). Some of them look rather interesting and informative, but such sources must be thoroughly checked and analyzed. Without doing this, such sources cannot be considered objective by historians. This missing step in turn casts doubt on the conclusions reached by the authors.To justify their methodology, the authors explain that researchers had hoped that the Soviet archives would be opened, and yet twenty-seven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the archives preserving the documents of Politburo of the CPSU, materials of GRU, KGB, and Soviet army dealing with the events of 1967–73 are still closed to researchers. Unfortunately, this is true. The process of declassifying the documents dealing with events that happened about fifty years ago did not take place in contemporary Russia. Some documents were declassified during the anti-Communist campaign of Yeltsin in 1993, some were occasionally disclosed by different Russian and foreign researchers, some were published in the documental collections sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the Institute of Oriental Research of the Russian Academy of Science, but researchers were unable to see original documents showing the process of decision making or descriptions of Soviet military involvement in the operations abroad.There are several objective and subjective reasons that help explain this. According to Russian law, the Archives of the Ministry of Defense, Federal Security Service, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs are vedomstvennye (departmental) archives, and because of this they are not open for the public. This means that the automatic process of declassifying of the documents is not taking place in these archives, and even those researchers who manage to get permission to work there can see only the permitted documents. The Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) where the materials of the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party are preserved has no right to declassify its documents on its own. Because in contemporary Russia there is no legal successor of the CPSU, all the party's secret documents have to be passed to the Interdepartmental Commission for declassifying the secret documents where the decision is to be made regarding their value and possibility of declassifying. The members of this commission are usually former ambassadors and former KGB/GRU officers, trained to keep the secrets, who usually prefer to preserve the “state secrets” wherever possible. This brings us to the situation where the vast majority of the documents of the Soviet involvement in the Middle East of the Cold War period still cannot be seen and analyzed by historians. This lack of objective archival information in turn gives rise to a wide range of speculation

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History

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