The Soviet Policy in the October 1973 War: Unknown Pages and Historiographic Interpretations

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war has been examined many times by both Russian and foreign scholars. However, recently there has been an upsurge of interest in the Soviet policy during this war. Along with this, biased and one-sided interpretations of the Soviet position by Western and, especially, Israeli experts get widespread. This paper, based on a wide range of primary sources, both documents and memoirs, which only recently have become available to the academic community, seeks to revise or refute certain historiographic stereotypes regarding the Soviet policy in the Middle East at that period. In this regard, the author examines the Yom Kippur war in terms of the Soviet regional and global political interests, in particular, in the context of emerging US-Soviet détente. As for the regional context, the author pays special attention to the question of the Soviet government ability to influence its Middle Eastern partners, particularly, Anwar Sadat. The paper also highlights the role of ideology in shaping the Soviet position towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. The author concludes that in reality the Soviet influence on the Arab countries was very limited and, for instance, the Egyptian government gravitated more towards the United States than towards the Soviet Union. This reorientation of the Egypt’s foreign policy towards the US deprived the USSR of an important ally in the region. It also had a direct impact on subsequent peace negotiations from which the Soviet Union was de facto excluded. Finally, the Yom Kippur war also highlighted the negative effects of the overideologization of the Soviet foreign policy which impeded the efficiency of the Soviet leaders’ response to a rapidly changing situation in the region. At the same time this case reveals the true attitude of the Soviet leaders towards the détente in the Soviet-US relations. On the one hand, the Soviet government did not want the regional conflict to affect a newly reached level of the relationship between the superpowers. On the other hand, the October war unequivocally demonstrated that in the crisis situations the Kremlin’s desire to protect the Soviet strategic interests proved to be steadily stronger than its commitment to the spirit of détente.

the October 1973 war, the Yom Kippur war, the USSR, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the USA, Egypt, Anwar Sadat, the Middle East, the détente

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