When I heard that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and his colleague Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, were to visit Cairo, I dusted off my copies of Mohammed Hassanein Heikal’s The Sphinx and the Commissar and Soviet Policy Toward the Middle East since 1970 by Robert O. Freedman. I am glad I still have these books.  They remind those of us too young to remember fully the extent of Moscow’s once rather robust presence in Egypt.