Warsaw Pact

A central symbol of the Cold War, an organization (also known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization) that bound together the Soviet bloc countries of central and Eastern Europe in a military alliance pitted against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev drafted the founding document of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, and [Page 807]the member nations signed the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance later that year (on May 14) in Warsaw.

Although NATO was established in 1949, the Warsaw Pact's agreement stated that recent events—particularly a remilitarized West Germany's integration into NATO—had created a new ominous atmosphere. Faced with the threat of another war and a “menace to the national security of peaceloving states,” the pact's signatories decided to establish an alliance that would supersede the existing bilateral agreements that the countries had concluded since communist regimes took over central and Eastern Europe after World War II. The pact agreement bound member states to defend one another if attacked and set the pact's duration at 20 years with an automatic 10-year extension. The Warsaw Pact was renewed once, in 1985.

The signatories of the Warsaw Pact included the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; China was given observer status. Yugoslavia, which sought to chart its own socialist course and broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, was never a member. Albania ceased cooperating with the pact in 1961, after its Stalinist regime fell out with the Soviets and became more closely allied with Communist China.

Although the countries were all nominally equal members in the pact, in reality Moscow dictated all the alliance's moves and effectively ran it through the Soviet Ministry of Defense and General Staff, without a NATO-like independent structure. Top Warsaw Pact soldiers were trained in the Soviet Union. In its early history, the pact held few joint exercises, and the Soviet Union made no real attempt to integrate the members' armies into a multinational pact force.

That changed after Khrushchev and the Soviet elite saw de-Stalinization and attempts to permit the satellite states more autonomy spin out of control in the 1950s, first with Polish workers' riots in October 1956 and the Hungarian revolution that soon followed. During the Hungarian revolution, Budapest unilater-ally announced plans to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, a key reason behind Moscow's decision to use its troops to defeat the uprising, which left 25,000 Hungarians dead.

Faced with such defiance, the Soviets decided to transform the Warsaw Pact armies into more of an integrated multinational force that could suppress similar uprisings and, as a byproduct, limit the ability of any national forces to act independently of the Soviet Union. As part of that trend, many more joint military exercises between Soviet forces and the allied national armies began taking place in the 1960s.

The most notorious use of Warsaw Pact troops occurred during the so-called Prague Spring of 1968, when Czechoslovak Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek and his allies introduced liberalizing reforms aimed at creating what they called “socialism with a human face.” In contrast with the Hungarians, however, the Czechoslovaks did not seek to leave the Warsaw Pact, but to restructure and reform it.

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