Appendix C -- Germany (East)
THE WARSAW PACT
IN APRIL 1985, the general secretaries of the communist and workers'
parties of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland, and Romania
gathered in Warsaw to sign a protocol extending the effective
term of the 1955 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual
Assistance, which originally established the Soviet-led political-military
alliance in Eastern Europe. Their action ensured that the Warsaw
Pact, as it is commonly known, will remain part of the international
political and military landscape well into the future. The thirtieth
anniversary of the Warsaw Pact and its renewal make a review of
its origins and evolution particularly appropriate.
The Warsaw Pact alliance of the East European socialist states
is the nominal counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) on the European continent (see fig. A, this Appendix).
Unlike NATO, founded in 1949, however, the Warsaw Pact does not
have an independent organizational structure but functions as
part of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. In fact, throughout the
more than thirty years since it was founded, the Warsaw Pact has
served as one of the Soviet Union's primary mechanisms for keeping
its East European allies under its political and military control.
The Soviet Union has used the Warsaw Pact to erect a facade of
collective decision making and action around the reality of its
political domination and military intervention in the internal
affairs of its allies. At the same time, the Soviet Union also
has used the Warsaw Pact to develop East European socialist armies
and harness them to its military strategy.
Since its inception, the Warsaw Pact has reflected the changing
pattern of Soviet-East European relations and manifested problems
that affect all alliances. The Warsaw Pact has evolved into something
other than the mechanism of control the Soviet Union originally
intended it to be, and it has become increasingly less dominated
by the Soviet Union since the 1960s. The organizational structure
of the Warsaw Pact has grown and has provided a forum for greater
intra-alliance debate, bargaining, and conflict between the Soviet
Union and its allies over the issues of national independence,
policy autonomy, and East European participation in alliance decision
making. While the Warsaw Pact retains its internal function in
Soviet-East European relations, its non-Soviet members have also
developed sufficient military capabilities to become useful adjuncts
of Soviet power against NATO in Europe.
THE SOVIET ALLIANCE SYSTEM, 1943-55
Long before the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the
Soviet Union had molded the East European states into an alliance
serving its security interests. While liberating Eastern Europe
from Nazi Germany in World War II, the Red Army established political
and military control over that region. The Soviet Union's size,
economic weight, and sheer military power made its domination
inevitable in this part of Europe, which historically had been
dominated by great powers. The Soviet Union intended to use Eastern
Europe as a buffer zone for the forward defense of its western
borders and to keep threatening ideological influences at bay.
Continued control of Eastern Europe became second only to defense
of the homeland in the hierarchy of Soviet security priorities.
The Soviet Union ensured its control of the region by turning
the East European countries into subjugated allies.
The Organization of East European National Units, 1943-45
During World War II, the Soviet Union began to build what Soviet
sources refer to as history's first coalition of a progressive
type when it organized or reorganized the armies of Eastern Europe
to fight with the Red Army against the German Wehrmacht. The command
and control procedures established in this military alliance would
serve as the model on which the Soviet Union would build the Warsaw
Pact after 1955. During the last years of the war, Soviet commanders
and officers gained valuable experience in directing multinational
forces that would later be put to use in the Warsaw Pact. The
units formed between 1943 and 1945 also provided the foundation
on which the Soviet Union could build postwar East European national
armies.
The Red Army began to form, train, and arm Polish and Czechoslovak
national units on Soviet territory in 1943. These units fought
with the Red Army as it carried its offensive westward into German-occupied
Poland and Czechoslovakia and then into Germany itself. By contrast,
Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania were wartime enemies of the Soviet
Union. Although ruled by ostensibly fascist regimes, these countries
allied with Nazi Germany mainly to recover territories lost through
the peace settlements of World War I or seized by the Soviet Union
under the terms of the 1939 Nazi- Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
However, by 1943 the Red Army had destroyed the Bulgarian, Hungarian,
and Romanian forces fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. In 1944
it occupied Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, and shortly thereafter
it began the process of transforming the remnants of their armies
into allied units that could re-enter the war on the side of the
Soviet Union. These allied units represented a mix of East European
nationals fleeing Nazi occupation, deportees from Soviet-occupied
areas, and enemy prisoners-of-war. Red Army political officers
organized extensive indoctrination programs in the allied units
under Soviet control and purged any politically suspect personnel.
In all, the Soviet Union formed and armed more than 29 divisions
and 37 brigades or regiments, which included more than 500,000
East European troops.
The allied national formations were directly subordinate to the
headquarters of the Soviet Supreme High Command and its executive
body, the Soviet General Staff. Although the Soviet Union directly
commanded all allied units, the Supreme High Command included
one representative from each of the East European forces. Lacking
authority, these representatives simply relayed directives from
the Supreme High Command and General Staff to the commanders of
East European units. While all national units had so-called Soviet
advisers, some Red Army officers openly discharged command and
staff responsibilities in the East European armies. Even when
commanded by East European officers, non-Soviet contingents participated
in operations against the Wehrmacht only as part of Soviet fronts.
The Development of Socialist Armies in Eastern Europe, 1945-
55
At the end of World War II, the Red Army occupied Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary, Poland, and eastern Germany, and Soviet front commanders
headed the Allied Control Commission in each of these occupied
countries. The Soviet Union gave its most important occupation
forces a garrison status when it established the Northern Group
of Forces (NGF) in 1947 and the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany
(GSFG) in 1949. By 1949 the Soviet Union had concluded twenty-year
bilateral treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance
with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. These
treaties prohibited the East European regimes from entering into
relations with states hostile to the Soviet Union, officially
made these countries Soviet allies, and granted the Soviet Union
rights to a continued military presence on their territory. The
continued presence of Red Army forces guaranteed Soviet control
of these countries. By contrast, the Soviet Union did not occupy
either Albania or Yugoslavia during or after the war, and both
countries remained outside direct Soviet control.
The circumstances of Soviet occupation facilitated the installation
of communist-dominated governments called "people's democracies"
in Eastern Europe. The indoctrinated East European troops that
had fought with the Red Army to liberate their countries from
Nazi occupation became politically useful to the Soviet Union
as it established socialist states in Eastern Europe. The East
European satellite regimes depended entirely on Soviet military
power--and the continued deployment of 1 million Red Army soldiers--to
stay in power. In return, the new East European political and
military elites were obliged to respect Soviet political and security
interests in the region.
While transforming the East European governments, the Soviet
Union also continued the process of strengthening its political
control over the East European armed forces and reshaping them
along Soviet military lines after World War II. In Eastern Europe,
the Soviet Union instituted a system of local communist party
controls over the military based on the Soviet model. The East
European communist parties thoroughly penetrated the East European
military establishments to ensure their loyalty to the newly established
political order. At the same time, the Soviet Union built these
armies up to support local security and police forces against
domestic disorder or other threats to communist party rule. Reliable
East European military establishments could be counted on to support
communist rule and, consequently, ensure continued Soviet control
of Eastern Europe. In fact, in the late 1940s and the 1950s the
Soviet Union was more concerned about cultivating and monitoring
political loyalty in its East European military allies than increasing
their utility as combat forces.
The postwar military establishments in Eastern Europe consisted
of rival communist and noncommunist wartime antifascist resistance
movements, national units established on Soviet territory during
the war, prewar national military commands, and various other
armed forces elements that spent the war years in exile or fighting
in the West. Using the weight of the Red Army and its occupation
authority, the Soviet Union purged or co-opted the noncommunist
nationalists in the East European armies and thereby eliminated
a group likely to oppose their restructuring along Soviet lines.
In the case of communist forces, the Soviet Union trusted and
promoted personnel who had served in the national units formed
on its territory over native communists who had fought in the
East European underground organizations independent of Soviet
control.
After 1948 the East European armies adopted regular political
education programs. This Soviet-style indoctrination was aimed
primarily at raising communist party membership within the officer
corps and building a military leadership cadre loyal to the socialist
system and the national communist regime. Unquestionable political
loyalty was more important than professional competence for advancement
in the military hierarchy. Appropriate class origin became the
principal criterion for admission to the East European officer
corps and military schools. The Soviet Union and national communist
party regimes transformed the East European military establishments
into a vehicle of upward mobility for the working class and peasantry,
who were unaccustomed to this kind of opportunity. Many of the
officers in the new East European armed forces supported the new
regimes because their newly acquired professional and social status
hinged on the continuance of communist party rule.
The Soviet Union assigned trusted national communist party leaders
to the most important East European military command positions
despite their lack of military qualifications. The East European
ministries of defense established political departments on the
model of the Main Political Administration of the Soviet Army
and Navy. Throughout the 1950s, prewar East European communists
served as political officers, sharing command prerogatives with
professional officers and evaluating their loyalty to the communist
regime and compliance with its directives. Heavily armed paramilitary
forces under the control of the East European internal security
networks became powerful rivals for the national armies and checked
their potentially great influence within the political system.
The Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus also closely monitored
the allied national military establishments.
Despite the great diversity of the new Soviet allies in terms
of military history and traditions, the Sovietization of the East
European national armies, which occurred between 1945 and the
early 1950s, followed a consistent pattern in every case. The
Soviet Union forced its East European allies to emulate Soviet
Army ranks and uniforms and abandon all distinctive national military
customs and practices; these allied armies used all Soviet-made
weapons and equipment. The Soviet Union also insisted on the adoption
of Soviet Army organization and tactics within the East European
armies. Following the precedent established during World War II,
the Soviet Union assigned Soviet officers to duty at all levels
of the East European national command structures, from the general
(main) staffs down to the regimental level, as its primary means
of military control. Although officially termed advisers, these
Soviet Army officers generally made the most important decisions
within the East European armies. Direct Soviet control over the
national military establishments was most complete in strategically
important Poland. Soviet officers held approximately half the
command positions in the postwar Polish Army despite the fact
that few spoke Polish. Soviet officers and instructors staffed
the national military academies, and the study of Russian became
mandatory for East European army officers. The Soviet Union also
accepted many of the most promising and eager East European officers
into Soviet mid-career military institutions and academies for
the advanced study essential to their promotion within the national
armed forces command structures.
Despite Soviet efforts to develop political and military instruments
of control and the continued presence of Soviet Army occupation
forces, the Soviet Union still faced resistance to its domination
of Eastern Europe. The Soviet troops in the GSFG acted unilaterally
when the East German Garrisoned People's Police refused to crush
the June 1953 workers' uprising in East Berlin. This action set
a precedent for the Soviet use of force to retain control of its
buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
THE WARSAW PACT, 1955-70
East-West Diplomacy and the Formation of the Warsaw Pact
In May 1955, the Soviet Union institutionalized its East European
alliance system when it gathered together representatives from
Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania
in Warsaw to sign the multilateral Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation,
and Mutual Assistance, which was identical to their existing bilateral
treaties with the Soviet Union. Initially, the Soviets claimed
that the Warsaw Pact was a direct response to the inclusion of
the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in NATO in 1955.
The formation of a legally defined, multilateral alliance organization
also reinforced the Soviet Union's claim to power status as the
leader of the world socialist system, enhanced its prestige, and
legitimized its presence and influence in Eastern Europe. However,
as events inside the Soviet alliance developed, this initial external
impetus for the formation of the Warsaw Pact lost its importance,
and the Soviet Union found a formal alliance useful for other
purposes. The Soviet Union created a structure for dealing with
its East European allies more efficiently when it superimposed
the multilateral Warsaw Pact on their existing bilateral treaty
ties.
In the early 1950s, the United States and its Western allies
carried out an agreement to re-arm West Germany and integrate
it into NATO. This development threatened a vital Soviet foreign
policy objective: the Soviet Union was intent on preventing the
resurgence of a powerful German nation and particularly one allied
with the Western powers. In an effort to derail the admission
of West Germany to NATO, the Soviet representative at the 1954
Four- Power Foreign Ministers Conference in Berlin, Viacheslav
Molotov, went so far as to propose the possibility of holding
simultaneous elections in both German states that might lead to
a re-unified, though neutral and unarmed, Germany. At the same
time, the Soviet Union also proposed to the Western powers a general
treaty on collective security in Europe and the dismantling of
existing military blocs (meaning NATO). When this tactic failed
and West Germany joined NATO on May 5, 1955, the Soviet Union
declared that West Germany's membership in the Western alliance
created a special threat to Soviet interests. The Soviet Union
also declared that this development made its existing network
of bilateral treaties an inadequate security guarantee and forced
the East European socialist countries to "combine efforts in a
strong political and military alliance." On May 14, 1955, the
Soviet Union and its East European allies signed the Warsaw Pact.
While the Soviets had avoided formalizing their alliance to keep
the onus of dividing Europe into opposing blocs on the West, the
admission into NATO of the European state with the greatest potential
military power forced the Soviet Union to take NATO into account
for the first time. The Soviet Union also used West Germany's
membership in NATO for propaganda purposes. The Soviets evoked
the threat of a re-armed, "revanchist" West Germany seeking to
reverse its defeat in World War II to remind the East European
countries of their debt to the Soviet Union for their liberation,
their need for Soviet protection against a recent enemy, and their
corresponding duty to respect Soviet security interests and join
the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviet Union had important reasons for institutionalizing
the informal alliance system established through its bilateral
treaties with the East European countries, concluded before the
1949 formation of NATO. As a formal organization, the Warsaw Pact
provided the Soviet Union an official counterweight to NATO in
East-West diplomacy. The Warsaw Pact gave the Soviet Union an
equal status with the United States as the leader of an alliance
of ostensibly independent nations supporting its foreign policy
initiatives in the international arena. The multilateral Warsaw
Pact was an improvement over strictly bilateral ties as a mechanism
for transmitting Soviet defense and foreign policy directives
to the East European allies. The Warsaw Pact also helped to legitimize
the presence of Soviet troop--and overwhelming Soviet influence--in
Eastern Europe.
The 1955 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance
between the Soviet Union and its East European allies, which established
the Warsaw Pact, stated that relations among the signatories were
based on total equality, mutual noninterference in internal affairs,
and respect for national sovereignty and independence. It declared
that the Warsaw Pact's function was collective self-defense of
the member states against external aggression, as provided for
in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The terms of the
alliance specified the Political Consultative Committee (PCC)
as the highest alliance organ. The founding document formed the
Joint Command to organize the actual defense of the Warsaw Pact
member states, declared that the national deputy ministers of
defense would act as the deputies of the Warsaw Pact commander
in chief, and established the Joint Staff, which included the
representatives of the general (main) staffs of all its member
states. The treaty set the Warsaw Pact's duration at twenty years
with an automatic ten-year extension, provided that none of the
member states renounced it before its expiration. The treaty also
included a standing offer to disband simultaneously with other
military alliances, i.e., NATO, contingent on East-West agreement
about a general treaty on collective security in Europe. This
provision indicated that the Soviet Union either did not expect
that such an accord could be negotiated or did not consider its
new multilateral alliance structure very important.
Early Organizational Structure and Activities
Until the early 1960s, the Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact
more as a tool in East-West diplomacy than as a functioning political-military
alliance. Under the leadership of General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev,
the Soviet Union sought to project a more flexible and less threatening
image abroad and, toward this end, used the alliance's PCC to
publicize its foreign policy initiatives and peace offensives,
including frequent calls for the formation of an all-European
collective security system to replace the continent's existing
military alliances. The main result of Western acceptance of these
disingenuous Soviet proposals would have been the removal of American
troops from Europe, the weakening of ties among the Western states,
and increasingly effective Soviet pressure on Western Europe.
The Soviet Union also used the PCC to propose a nonaggression
pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the establishment of
a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe.
In the first few years after 1955, little of the Warsaw Pact's
activity was directed at building a multilateral military alliance.
The Soviet Union concentrated primarily on making the Warsaw Pact
a reliable instrument for controlling the East European allies.
In fact, the putatively supranational military agencies of the
Warsaw Pact were completely subordinate to a national agency of
the Soviet Union. The Soviet General Staff in Moscow housed the
alliance's Joint Command and Joint Staff and, through these organs,
controlled the entire military apparatus of the Warsaw Pact as
well as the allied armies. Although the highest ranking officers
of the alliance were supposed to be selected through the mutual
agreement of its member states, the Soviets unilaterally appointed
a first deputy Soviet minister of defense and first deputy chief
of the Soviet General Staff to serve as Warsaw Pact commander
in chief and chief of staff, respectively. While these two Soviet
officers ranked below the Soviet minister of defense, they still
outranked the ministers of defense in the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact
(NSWP) countries. The Soviet General Staff also posted senior
colonel generals as resident representatives of the Warsaw Pact
commander in chief in all East European capitals. Serving with
the "agreement of their host countries," these successors to the
wartime and postwar Soviet advisers for the allied armies equaled
the East European ministers of defense in rank and provided a
point of contact for the commander in chief, Joint Command, and
Soviet General Staff inside the national military establishments.
They directed and monitored the military training and political
indoctrination programs of the national armies to synchronize
their development with the Soviet Army. The strict Soviet control
of the Warsaw Pact's high military command positions, established
at this early stage, clearly indicated the subordination of the
East European allies to the Soviet Union.
In 1956 the Warsaw Pact member states admitted East Germany to
the Joint Command and sanctioned the transformation of its Garrisoned
People's Police into a full-fledged army. But the Soviet Union
took no steps to integrate the allied armies into a multinational
force. The Soviet Union organized only one joint Warsaw Pact military
exercise and made no attempt to make the alliance functional before
1961 except through the incorporation of East European territory
into the Soviet national air defense structure.
De-Stalinization and National Communism
In his 1956 secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, General Secretary Khrushchev denounced
the arbitrariness, excesses, and terror of the Joseph Stalin era.
Khrushchev sought to achieve greater legitimacy for communist
party rule on the basis of the party's ability to meet the material
needs of the Soviet population. His de-Stalinization campaign
quickly influenced developments in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev
accepted the replacement of Stalinist Polish and Hungarian leaders
with newly rehabilitated communist party figures, who were able
to generate genuine popular support for their regimes by molding
the socialist system to the specific historical, political, and
economic conditions in their countries. Pursuing his more sophisticated
approach in international affairs, Khrushchev sought to turn Soviet-controlled
East European satellites into at least semisovereign countries
and to make Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact less obvious.
The Warsaw Pact's formal structure served Khrushchev's purpose
well, providing a facade of genuine consultation and of joint
defense and foreign-policy decision making by the Soviet Union
and the East European countries.
De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union made a superficial renationalization
of the East European military establishments possible. The Soviet
Union allowed the East European armies to restore their distinctive
national practices and to re-emphasize professional military opinions
over political considerations in most areas. Military training
supplanted political indoctrination as the primary task of the
East European military establishments. Most important, the Soviet
Ministry of Defense recalled many Soviet Army officers and advisers
from their positions within the East European armies. Although
the Soviet Union still remained in control of its alliance system,
these changes in the Warsaw Pact and the NSWP armies removed some
of the most objectionable features of Sovietization.
In October 1956, the Polish and Hungarian communist parties lost
control of the de-Stalinization process in their countries. The
ensuing crises threatened the integrity of the entire Soviet alliance
system in Eastern Europe. Although Khrushchev reacted quickly
to rein in the East European allies and thwart this challenge
to Soviet interests, his response in these two cases led to a
significant change in the role of the Warsaw Pact as an element
of Soviet security.
The "Polish October"
The October 1956, workers' riots in Poland defined the boundaries
of national communism acceptable to the Soviet Union. The Polish
United Workers Party found that the grievances that inspired the
riots could be ameliorated without presenting a challenge to its
monopoly on political power or its strict adherence to Soviet
foreign policy and security interests. At first, when the Polish
Army and police forces refused to suppress rioting workers, the
Soviet Union prepared its forces in East Germany and Poland for
an intervention to restore order in the country. However, Poland's
new communist party leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, and the Polish
Army's top commanders indicated to Khrushchev and the other Soviet
leaders that any Soviet intervention in the internal affairs of
Poland would meet united, massive resistance. While insisting
on Poland's right to exercise greater autonomy in domestic matters,
Gomulka also pointed out that the Polish United Workers Party
remained in firm control of the country and expressed his intention
to continue to accept Soviet direction in external affairs. Gomulka
even denounced the simultaneous revolution in Hungary and Hungary's
attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact, which nearly ruptured the Soviet
alliance system in Eastern Europe. Gomulka's position protected
the Soviet Union's most vital interests and enabled Poland to
reach a compromise with the Soviet leadership to defuse the crisis.
Faced with Polish resistance to a possible invasion, the Soviet
Union established its minimum requirements for the East European
allies: upholding the leading role of the communist party in society
and remaining a member of the Warsaw Pact. These two conditions
ensured that Eastern Europe would remain a buffer zone for the
Soviet Union.
The Hungarian Revolution
By contrast, the full-scale revolution in Hungary, which began
in late October with public demonstrations in support of the rioting
Polish workers, openly flouted these Soviet stipulations. An initial
domestic liberalization acceptable to the Soviet Union quickly
focused on nonnegotiable issues like the communist party's exclusive
hold on political power and genuine national independence. With
overwhelming support from the Hungarian public, the new communist
party leader, Imre Nagy, instituted multiparty elections. More
important, Nagy withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and ended
Hungary's alliance with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Army invaded
with 200,000 troops, crushed the Hungarian Revolution, and brought
Hungary back within limits tolerable to the Soviet Union. The
five days of pitched battles left 25,000 Hungarians dead.
After 1956 the Soviet Union practically disbanded the Hungarian
Army and reinstituted a program of political indoctrination in
the units that remained. In May 1957, unable to rely on Hungarian
forces to maintain order, the Soviet Union increased its troop
level in Hungary from two to four divisions and forced Hungary
to sign a status-of-forces agreement, placing the Soviet military
presence on a solid and permanent legal basis. The Soviet Army
forces stationed in Hungary officially became the Southern Group
of Forces (SGF).
The events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary forced a Soviet re-
evaluation of the reliability and roles of the NSWP countries
in its alliance system. Before 1956 the Soviet leadership believed
that the Stalinist policy of heavy political indoctrination and
enforced Sovietization had transformed the national armies into
reliable instruments of the Soviet Union. However, the East European
armies were still likely to remain loyal to national causes. Only
one Hungarian Army unit fought beside the Soviet troops that put
down the 1956 revolution. In both the Polish and the Hungarian
military establishments, a basic loyalty to the national communist
party regime was mixed with a strong desire for greater national
sovereignty. With East Germany still a recent enemy and Poland
and Hungary now suspect allies, the Soviet Union turned to Czechoslovakia
as its most reliable junior partner in the late 1950s and early
1960s. Czechoslovakia became the Soviet Union's first proxy in
the Third World when its military pilots trained Egyptian personnel
to fly Soviet-built MiG fighter aircraft. The Soviet Union thereby
established a pattern of shifting the weight of its reliance from
one East European country to another in response to various crises.
The Post 1956 Period
After the very foundation of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern
Europe was shaken in 1956, Khrushchev sought to shore up the Soviet
Union's position. Several developments made the task even more
difficult. Between 1956 and 1962, the growing Soviet- Chinese
dispute threatened to break up the Warsaw Pact. In 1962 Albania
severed relations with the Soviet Union and terminated Soviet
rights to the use of a valuable Mediterranean naval base on its
Adriatic Sea coast. That same year, Albania ended its active participation
in the Warsaw Pact and sided with the Chinese against the Soviets.
Following the example of Yugoslavia in the late 1940s, Albania
was able to resist Soviet pressures. Lacking a common border with
Albania and having neither occupation troops nor overwhelming
influence in that country, the Soviet Union was unable to use
either persuasion or force to bring Albania back into the Warsaw
Pact. Khrushchev used Warsaw Pact meetings to mobilize the political
support of the Soviet Union's East European allies against China
and Albania, as well as to reinforce its control of Eastern Europe
and its claim to leadership of the communist world. More important,
however, after Albania joined Yugoslavia and Hungary on the list
of defections and near-defections from the Soviet alliance system
in Eastern Europe, the Soviets began to turn the Warsaw Pact into
a tool for militarily preventing defections in the future.
The Internal Function of the Warsaw Pact
Although Khrushchev invoked the terms of the Warsaw Pact as a
justification for the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the action was
in no sense a cooperative allied effort. In the early 1960s, however,
the Soviets took steps to turn the alliance's Joint Armed Forces
(JAF) into a multinational invasion force. In the future, an appeal
to the Warsaw Pact's collective self-defense provisions and the
participation of allied forces would put a multilateral cover
over unilateral Soviet interventions to keep errant member states
in the alliance and their communist parties in power. The Soviet
Union sought to legitimize its future policing actions by presenting
them as the product of joint Warsaw Pact decisions. In this way,
the Soviets hoped to deflect the kind of direct international
criticism they were subjected to after the invasion of Hungary.
However, such internal deployments were clearly contrary to the
Warsaw Pact's rule of mutual noninterference in domestic affairs
and conflicted with the alliance's declared purpose of collective
self-defense against external aggression. To circumvent this semantic
difficulty, the Soviets merely redefined external aggression to
include any spontaneous anti-Soviet, anticommunist uprising in
an allied state. Discarding domestic grievances as a possible
cause, the Soviet Union declared that such outbreaks were a result
of imperialist provocations and thereby constituted external aggression.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union began to prepare the Warsaw Pact
for its internal function of keeping the NSWP member states within
the alliance. The Soviet Union took a series of steps to transform
the Warsaw Pact into its intra-alliance intervention force. Although
it had previously worked with the East European military establishments
on a bilateral basis, the Soviet Union started to integrate the
national armies under the Warsaw Pact framework. Marshal of the
Soviet Union Andrei Grechko, who became commander in chief of
the alliance in 1960, was uniquely qualified to serve in his post.
During World War II, he commanded a Soviet Army group that included
significant Polish and Czechoslovak units. Beginning in 1961,
Grechko made joint military exercises between Soviet forces and
the allied national armies the primary focus of Warsaw Pact military
activities.
The Soviet Union arranged these joint exercises to prevent any
NSWP member state from fully controlling its national army and
to reduce the possibility that an East European regime could successfully
resist Soviet domination and pursue independent policies. The
Soviet-organized series of joint Warsaw Pact exercises was intended
to prevent other East European national command authorities from
following the example of Yugoslavia and Albania and adopting a
territorial defense strategy. Developed in the Yugoslav and Albanian
partisan struggles of World War II, territorial defense entailed
a mobilization of the entire population for a prolonged guerrilla
war against an intervening power. Under this strategy, the national
communist party leadership would maintain its integrity to direct
the resistance, seek international support for the country's defense,
and keep an invader from replacing it with a more compliant regime.
Territorial defense deterred invasions by threatening considerable
opposition and enabled Yugoslavia and Albania to assert their
independence from the Soviet Union. By training and integrating
the remaining allied armies in joint exercises for operations
only within a multinational force, however, the Soviet Union reduced
the ability of the other East European countries to conduct military
actions independent of Soviet control or to hinder a Soviet invasion,
as Poland and Hungary had done in October 1956.
Large-scale multilateral exercises provided opportunities for
Soviet officers to command troops of different nationalities and
trained East European national units to take orders from the Warsaw
Pact or Soviet command structure. Including Soviet troops stationed
in the NSWP countries and the western military districts of the
Soviet Union, joint maneuvers drilled Soviet Army forces for rapid,
massive invasions of allied countries with the symbolic participation
of NSWP units. Besides turning the allied armies into a multinational
invasion force for controlling Eastern Europe, joint exercises
also gave the Warsaw Pact armies greater capabilities for a coalition
war against NATO. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union modernized
the NSWP armies with T-54 and T-55 tanks, self-propelled artillery,
short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) equipped with conventional
warheads, and MiG-21 and Su-7 ground attack fighter aircraft.
The Soviet Union completed the mechanization of East European
infantry divisions, and these new motorized rifle divisions trained
with the Soviet Army for combined arms combat in a nuclear environment.
These changes greatly increased the military value and effectiveness
of the NSWP forces. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union gave
the East European armies their first real supporting role in its
European theater operations.
Romania and the Warsaw Pact
Ironically, at the very time that the Soviet Union gave the Warsaw
Pact more substance and modernized its force structure, resentment
of Soviet political, organizational, and military domination of
the Warsaw Pact and the NSWP armies increased. There was considerable
East European dissatisfaction with a Warsaw Pact hierarchy that
placed a subordinate of the Soviet minister of defense over the
East European defense ministers. The Soviets considered the national
ministers of defense, with the rank of colonel general, equivalent
only to Soviet military district commanders. The strongest objections
to the subordinate status of the NSWP countries inside the Warsaw
Pact came from the Communist Party of Romanian (Partial Communist
Roman) and military leadership under Nicolae Ceausescu.
The first indications of an independent Romanian course appeared
while the Soviet Union was shoring up its hold on Eastern Europe
through formal status-of-forces agreements with its allies. In
1958 Romania moved in the opposite direction by demanding the
withdrawal from its territory of all Soviet troops, advisers,
and the Soviet resident representative. To cover Soviet embarrassment,
Khrushchev called this a unilateral troop reduction contributing
to greater European security. Reducing its participation in Warsaw
Pact activities considerably, Romania also refused to allow Soviet
or NSWP forces, which could serve as Warsaw Pact intervention
forces, to cross or conduct exercises on its territory.
In the 1960s Romania demanded basic changes in the Warsaw Pact
structure to give the East European member states a greater role
in alliance decision making. At several PCC meetings, Romania
proposed that the leading Warsaw Pact command positions, including
its commander in chief, rotate among the top military leaders
of each country. In response, the Soviet Union tried again to
mollify its allies and deemphasize its control of the alliance
by moving the Warsaw Pact military organization out of the Soviet
General Staff and making it a distinct entity, albeit still within
the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The Soviet Union also placed some
joint exercises held on NSWP territory under the nominal command
of the host country's minister of defense. However, Soviet Army
commanders still conducted almost two-thirds of all Warsaw Pact
maneuvers, and these concessions proved too little and too late.
With the aim of ending Soviet domination and guarding against
Soviet encroachments, Romania reasserted full national control
over its armed forces and military policies in 1963 when, following
the lead of Yugoslavia and Albania, it adopted a territorial defense
strategy called "War of the Entire People." This nation-in-arms
strategy entailed compulsory participation in civilian defense
organizations, militias, and reserve and paramilitary forces,
as well as rapid mobilization. The goal of Romania's strategy
was to make any Soviet intervention prohibitively protracted and
costly. Romania rejected any integration of Warsaw Pact forces
that could undercut its ability to resist a Soviet invasion. For
example, it ended its participation in Warsaw Pact joint exercises
because multinational maneuvers required the Romanian Army to
assign its forces to a non-Romanian command authority. Romania
stopped sending its army officers to Soviet military schools for
higher education. When the Romanian military establishment and
its educational institutions assumed these functions, training
focused strictly on Romania's independent military strategy. Romania
also terminated its regular exchange of intelligence with the
Soviet Union and directed counterintelligence efforts against
possible Soviet penetration of the Romanian Army. These steps
combined to make it a truly national military establishment responsive
only to domestic political authorities and ensured that it would
defend the country's sovereignty.
Romania's independent national defense policy helped to underwrite
its assertion of greater policy autonomy. In the only Warsaw Pact
body in which it continued to participate actively, the PCC, Romania
found a forum to make its disagreements with the Soviet Union
public, to frustrate Soviet plans, and to work to protect its
new autonomy. The Soviet Union could not maintain the illusion
of Warsaw Pact harmony when Romanian recalcitrance forced the
PCC to adopt "coordinated" rather than unanimous decisions. Romania
even held up PCC approval for several weeks of the appointment
of Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Iakubovskii as Warsaw Pact
commander in chief. However, Romania did not enjoy the relative
geographical isolation from the Soviet Union that made Yugoslav
and Albanian independence possible, and the Soviet Union would
not tolerate another outright withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
The Prague Spring
In 1968 an acute crisis in the Soviet alliance system suddenly
overwhelmed the slowly festering problem of Romania. The Prague
Spring represented a more serious challenge than that posed by
Romania because it occurred in an area more crucial to Soviet
security. The domestic liberalization program of the Czechoslovak
communist regime led by Alexander Dubcek threatened to generate
popular demands for similar changes in the other East European
countries and even parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union
believed it necessary to forestall the spread of liberalization
and to assert its right to enforce the boundaries of ideological
permissibility in Eastern Europe. However, domestic change in
Czechoslovakia also began to affect defense and foreign policy,
just as it had in Hungary in 1956, despite Dubcek's declared intention
to keep Czechoslovakia within the Warsaw Pact. This worrying development
was an important factor in the Soviet decision to invade Czechoslovakia
in 1968--one that Western analysts have generally overlooked.
The new political climate of the Prague Spring and the lifting
of press censorship brought into the open a longstanding debate
within the Czechoslovak military establishment over the nature
of the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia's membership in it. In the
mid- 1960s, this debate centered on Soviet domination of the NSWP
countries and of the Warsaw Pact and its command structure. Czechoslovakia
had supported Romania in its opposition to Soviet calls for greater
military integration and backed its demands for a genuine East
European role in alliance decision making at PCC meetings.
In 1968 high-ranking Czechoslovak officers and staff members
at the Klement Gottwald Military Academy began to discuss the
need for a truly independent national defense strategy based on
Czechoslovakia's national interests rather than the Soviet security
interests that always prevailed in the Warsaw Pact. The fundamental
premise of such an independent military policy was that an all-
European collective security system, mutual nonaggression agreements
among European states, the withdrawal of all troops from foreign
countries, and a Central European nuclear-free zone could guarantee
the country's security against outside aggression better than
its membership in the Warsaw Pact. Although the Soviet Union had
advocated these same arrangements in the 1950s, Czechoslovakia
was clearly out of step with the Soviet line in 1968. Czechoslovakia
threatened to complicate Soviet military strategy in Central Europe
by becoming a neutral country dividing the Warsaw Pact into two
parts along its front with NATO.
The concepts underpinning this developing Czechoslovak national
defense strategy were formalized in the Gottwald Academy Memorandum
circulated to the general (main) staffs of the other Warsaw Pact
armies. The Gottwald Memorandum received a favorable response
from Poland, Hungary, and Romania. In a televised news conference,
at the height of the 1968 crisis, the chief of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia's military department, Lieutenant General Vaclav
Prchlik, denounced the Warsaw Pact as an unequal alliance and
declared that the Czechoslovak Army was prepared to defend the
country's sovereignty by force, if necessary. In the end, the
Soviet Union intervened to prevent the Czechoslovak Army from
fully developing the military capabilities to implement its newly
announced independent defense strategy, which could have guaranteed
national independence in the political and economic spheres. The
August 1968 invasion preempted the possibility of the Czechoslovak
Army's mounting a credible deterrent against future Soviet interventions.
The Soviet decision in favor of intervention focused, in large
measure, on ensuring its ability to maintain physical control
of its wayward ally in the future.
In contrast to its rapid, bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution, the Soviet Union engaged in a lengthy campaign of
military coercion against Czechoslovakia. In 1968 the Soviet Union
conducted more joint Warsaw Pact exercises than in any other year
since the maneuvers began in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union
used these exercises to mask preparations for, and threaten, a
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that would occur unless
Dubcek complied with Soviet demands and abandoned his political
liberalization program. Massive Warsaw Pact rear services and
communications exercises in July and August enabled the Soviet
General Staff to execute its plan for the invasion without alerting
Western governments. Under the pretext of exercises, Soviet and
NSWP divisions were brought up to full strength, reservists were
called up, and civilian transportation resources were requisitioned.
The cover that these exercises provided allowed the Soviet Union
to deploy forces along Czechoslovakia's borders in Poland and
East Germany and to demonstrate to the Czechoslovak leadership
its readiness to intervene.
On August 20, a force consisting of twenty-three Soviet Army
divisions invaded Czechoslovakia. Token NSWP contingents, including
one Hungarian, two East German, and two Polish divisions, along
with one Bulgarian brigade, also took part in the invasion. In
the wake of its invasion, the Soviet Union installed a more compliant
communist party leadership and concluded a status-of-forces agreement
with Czechoslovakia, which established a permanent Soviet presence
in that country for the first time. Five Soviet Army divisions
remained in Czechoslovakia to protect the country from future
"imperialist threats." These troops became the Central Group of
Forces (CGF) and added to Soviet strength directly bordering NATO.
The Czechoslovak Army, having failed to oppose the Soviet intervention
and defend the country's sovereignty, suffered a tremendous loss
of prestige after 1968. At Soviet direction, reliable Czechoslovak
authorities conducted a purge and political re-education campaign
in the Czechoslovak Army and cut its size. After 1968 the Soviet
Union closed and reorganized the Klement Gottwald Military Academy.
With its one-time junior partner now proven unreliable, the Soviet
Union turned to Poland as its principal East European ally.
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia showed the hollowness
of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe in both its political
and its military aspects. The Soviet Union did not convene the
PCC to invoke the Warsaw Pact during the 1968 crisis because a
formal PCC session would have revealed a deep rift in the Soviet
alliance and given Czechoslovakia an international platform from
which it could have defended its reform program. The Soviet Union
did not allow NSWP officers to direct the Warsaw Pact exercises
that preceded the intervention in Czechoslovakia, and Soviet Army
officers commanded all multinational exercises during the crisis.
While the intervention force was mobilized and deployed under
the Warsaw Pact's commander in chief, the Soviet General Staff
transferred full operational command of the invasion to the commander
in chief of the Soviet ground forces, Army General I. G. Pavlovskii.
Despite the participation of numerous East European army units,
the invasion of Czechoslovakia was not in any sense a multilateral
action. The Soviet invasion force carried out all important operations
on Czechoslovakia's territory. Moreover, the Soviet Union quickly
withdrew all NSWP troops from Czechoslovakia to forestall the
possibility of their ideological contamination. NSWP participation
served primarily to make the invasion appear to be a multinational
operation and to deflect direct international criticism of the
Soviet Union.
While the participation of four NSWP armies in the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia demonstrated considerable Warsaw Pact
cohesion, the invasion also served to erode it. The invasion of
Czechoslovakia proved that the Warsaw Pact's internal mission
of keeping orthodox East European communist party regimes in power--
and less orthodox ones in line--was more important than the external
mission of defending its member states against external aggression.
The Soviet Union was unable to conceal the fact that the alliance
served as the ultimate mechanism for its control of Eastern Europe.
Formulated in response to the crisis in Czechoslovakia, the so-called
Brezhnev Doctrine declared that the East European countries had
"limited" sovereignty to be exercised only as long as it did not
damage the interests of the "socialist commonwealth" as a whole.
Since the Soviet Union defined the interests of the "socialist
commonwealth," it could force its NSWP allies to respect its overwhelming
security interest in keeping Eastern Europe as its buffer zone.
The Romanian leader, Ceausescu, after refusing to contribute
troops to the Soviet intervention force as the other East European
countries had done, denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia as
a violation of international law and the Warsaw Pact's cardinal
principle of mutual noninterference in internal affairs. Ceausescu
insisted that collective self-defense against external aggression
was the only valid mission of the Warsaw Pact. Albania also objected
to the Soviet invasion and indicated its disapproval by withdrawing
formally from the Warsaw Pact after six years of inactive membership.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE WARSAW PACT
The Warsaw Pact administers both the political and the military
activities of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe. A
series of changes beginning in 1969 gave the Warsaw Pact the structure
it retained through the mid-1980s.
Political Organization
The general (first) secretaries of the communist and workers'
parties and heads of state of the Warsaw Pact member states meet
in the PCC (see table A, this Appendix). The PCC provides a formal
point of contact for the Soviet and East European leaders in addition
to less formal bilateral meetings and visits. As the highest decision-making
body of the Warsaw Pact, the PCC is charged with assessing international
developments that could affect the security of the allied states
and warrant the execution of the Warsaw Pact's collective self-defense
provisions. In practice, however, the Soviet Union has been unwilling
to rely on the PCC to perform this function, fearing that Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Romania could use PCC meetings to oppose Soviet
plans and policies. The PCC is also the main center for coordinating
the foreign policy activities of the Warsaw Pact countries. Since
the late 1960s, when several member states began to use the alliance
structure to confront the Soviets and assert more independent
foreign policies, the Soviet Union has had to bargain and negotiate
to gain support for its foreign policy within Warsaw Pact councils.
In 1976 the PCC established the permanent Committee of Ministers
of Foreign Affairs (CMFA) to regularize the previously ad hoc
meetings of Soviet and East European representatives to the Warsaw
Pact. Given the official task of preparing recommendations for
and executing the decisions of the PCC, the CMFA and its permanent
Joint Secretariat have provided the Soviet Union an additional
point of contact to establish a consensus among its allies on
contentious issues. Less formal meetings of the deputy ministers
of foreign affairs of the Warsaw Pact member states represent
another layer of alliance coordination. If alliance problems can
be resolved at these working levels, they will not erupt into
embarrassing disputes between the Soviet and East European leaders
at PCC meetings.
Military Organization
The Warsaw Pact's military organization is larger and more active
than the alliance's political bodies. Several different organizations
are responsible for implementing PCC directives on defense matters
and developing the capabilities of the national armies that constitute
the JAF. However, the principal task of the military organizations
is to link the East European armies to the Soviet armed forces.
The alliance's military agencies coordinate the training and mobilization
of East European national forces assigned to the Warsaw Pact.
In turn, these forces can be deployed in accordance with Soviet
military strategy against an NSWP country or NATO.
Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance is scarcely
veiled. The Warsaw Pact's JAF has no command structure, logistics
network, air defense system, or operations directorate separate
from the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia
demonstrated how easily control of the JAF could be transferred
in wartime to the Soviet General Staff and Soviet field commanders.
The dual roles of the Warsaw Pact commander in chief, who is a
first deputy Soviet minister of defense, and the Warsaw Pact chief
of staff, who is a first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff,
facilitate the transfer of Warsaw Pact forces to Soviet control.
The subordination of the Warsaw Pact to the Soviet General Staff
is also shown clearly in the Soviet military hierarchy. The chief
of the Soviet General Staff is listed above the Warsaw Pact commander
in chief in the Soviet order of precedence, even though both positions
are filled by first deputy Soviet ministers of defense.
Ironically, the first innovations in the Warsaw Pact's structure
since 1955 came after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had
clearly underlined Soviet control of the alliance. At the 1969
PCC session in Budapest, the Soviet Union agreed to cosmetic alterations
in the Warsaw Pact designed to address East European complaints
about Soviet domination of the alliance. These changes included
the establishment of the formal Committee of Ministers of Defense
(CMD) and the Military Council as well as the addition of more
non-Soviet officers to the Joint Command and the Joint Staff (see
fig. B, this Appendix).
The CMD is the leading military body of the Warsaw Pact. In addition
to the ministers of defense of the Warsaw Pact member states,
the commander in chief and the chief of staff of the JAF are statutory
members of the CMD. With its three seats on the CMD, the Soviet
Union can exercise a working majority in the nine-member body
with the votes of only two of its more loyal East European allies.
The chairmanship of the CMD supposedly rotates among the ministers
of defense. In any event, the brief annual meetings of the CMD
severely limit its work to pro forma pronouncements or narrow
guidelines for the Joint Command, Military Council, and Joint
Staff to follow.
The Joint Command develops the overall training plan for joint
Warsaw Pact exercises and for the national armies to promote the
assimilation of Soviet equipment and tactics. Headed by the Warsaw
Pact's commander in chief, the Joint Command is divided into distinct
Soviet and East European tiers. The deputy commanders in chief
include Soviet and East European officers. The Soviet officers
serving as deputy commanders in chief are specifically responsible
for coordinating the East European navies and air forces with
the corresponding Soviet service branches. The East European deputy
commanders in chief are the deputy ministers of defense of the
NSWP countries. While providing formal NSWP representation in
the Joint Command, the East European deputies also assist in the
coordination of Soviet and non-Soviet forces. The commander in
chief, deputy commanders in chief, and chief of staff of the JAF
gather in the Military Council on a semiannual basis to plan and
evaluate operational and combat training. With the Warsaw Pact's
commander in chief acting as chairman, the sessions of the Military
Council rotate among the capitals of the Warsaw Pact countries.
The Joint Staff is the only standing Warsaw Pact military body
and the official executive organ of the CMD, commander in chief,
and Military Council. As such, it performs the bulk of the Warsaw
Pact's work in the military realm. Like the Joint Command, the
Joint Staff has both Soviet and East European officers. These
non- Soviet officers also serve as the principal link between
the Soviet and East European armed forces. The Joint Staff organizes
all joint exercises and arranges multilateral meetings and contacts
of Warsaw Pact military personnel at all levels.
The PCC's establishment of official CMD meetings, the Military
Council, and the bifurcation of the Joint Command and Joint Staff
allowed for greater formal East European representation, as well
as more working-level positions for senior non-Soviet officers,
in the alliance. Increased NSWP input into the alliance decision-making
process ameliorated East European dissatisfaction with continued
Soviet dominance of the Warsaw Pact and even facilitated the work
of the JAF. However, a larger NSWP role in the alliance did not
reduce actual Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact command structure.
The 1969 PCC meeting also approved the formation of two more
Warsaw Pact military bodies, the Military Scientific-Technical
Council and the Technical Committee. These innovations in the
Warsaw Pact structure represented a Soviet attempt to harness
NSWP weapons and military equipment production, which had greatly
increased during the 1960s. The Military Scientific-Technical
Council assumed responsibility for directing armaments research
and development within the Warsaw Pact, while the Technical Committee
coordinated standardization. Comecon's Military-Industrial Commission
supervised NSWP military production facilities (see Appendix B).
After 1969 the Soviet Union insisted on tighter Warsaw Pact military
integration as the price for greater NSWP participation in alliance
decision making. Under the pretext of directing Warsaw Pact programs
and activities aimed at integration, officers from the Soviet
Ministry of Defense penetrated the East European armed forces.
Meetings between senior officers from the Soviet and East European
main political administrations allowed the Soviets to monitor
the loyalty of the national military establishments. Joint Warsaw
Pact exercises afforded ample opportunity for the evaluation and
selection of reliable East European officers for promotion to
command positions in the field, the national military hierarchies,
and the Joint Staff. Warsaw Pact military science conferences,
including representatives from each NSWP general (main) staff,
enabled the Soviets to check for signs that an East European ally
was formulating a national strategy or developing military capabilities
beyond Soviet control. In 1973 the deputy ministers of foreign
affairs signed the "Convention on the Capacities, Privileges,
and Immunities of the Staff and Other Administrative Organs of
the Joint Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact Member States," which
established the principle of extraterritoriality for alliance
agencies, legally sanctioned the efforts of these Soviet officers
to penetrate the East European military establishments, and prevented
any host government interference in their work. Moreover, the
Warsaw Pact commander in chief still retained his resident representatives
in the national ministries of defense as direct sources of information
on the situation inside the allied armies.
THE WARSAW PACT, 1970-87
The crisis in Czechoslovakia and Romania's recalcitrance gave
a new dimension to the challenge facing the Soviet Union in Eastern
Europe. The Soviet Union's East European allies had learned that
withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and achieving independence from
Soviet control were unrealistic goals, and they aimed instead
at establishing a greater measure of autonomy within the alliance.
Romania had successfully carved out a more independent position
within the bounds of the Warsaw Pact. In doing so, it provided
an example to the other East European countries of how to use
the Warsaw Pact councils and committees to articulate positions
contrary to Soviet interests. Beginning in the early 1970s, the
East European allies formed intra-alliance coalitions in Warsaw
Pact meetings to oppose the Soviet Union, defuse its pressure
on any one NSWP member state, and delay or obstruct Soviet policies.
The Soviets could no longer use the alliance to transmit their
positions to, and receive an automatic endorsement from, the subordinate
NSWP countries. While still far from genuine consultation, Warsaw
Pact policy coordination between the Soviet Union and the East
European countries in the 1970s was a step away from the blatant
Soviet control of the alliance that had characterized the 1950s.
East European opposition forced the Soviet Union to treat the
Warsaw Pact as a forum for managing relations with its allies
and bidding for their support on issues like détente, the Third
World, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, alliance burden-sharing,
and relations with NATO.
Détente
In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its earlier efforts
to achieve the simultaneous dissolution of the two European military
blocs and concentrated instead on legitimizing the territorial
status quo in Europe. The Soviets asserted that the official East-West
agreements reached during the détente era "legally secured the
most important political-territorial results of World War II."
Under these arrangements, the Soviet Union allowed its East European
allies to recognize West Germany's existence as a separate state.
In return the West, and West Germany in particular, explicitly
accepted the inviolability of all postwar borders in Eastern Europe
and tacitly recognized Soviet control of the eastern half of both
Germany and Europe. The Soviets claim the 1975 Helsinki Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which ratified the
existing political division of Europe, as a major victory for
Soviet diplomacy and the realization of longstanding Soviet calls,
issued through the PCC, for a general European conference on collective
security.
The consequences of détente, however, also posed a significant
challenge to Soviet control of Eastern Europe. First, détente
caused a crisis in Soviet-East German relations. East Germany's
leader, Walter Ulbricht, opposed improved relations with West
Germany and, following Ceausescu's tactics, used Warsaw Pact councils
to attack the Soviet détente policy openly. In the end, the Soviet
Union removed Ulbricht from power, in 1971, and proceeded unhindered
into détente with the West. Second, détente blurred the strict
bipolarity of the cold war era, opened Eastern Europe to greater
Western influence, and loosened Soviet control over its allies.
The relaxation of East-West tensions in the 1970s reduced the
level of threat perceived by the NSWP countries, along with their
perceived need for Soviet protection, and eroded Warsaw Pact alliance
cohesion. After the West formally accepted the territorial status
quo in Europe, the Soviet Union was unable to point to the danger
of "imperialist" attempts to overturn East European communist
party regimes to justify its demand for strict Warsaw Pact unity
behind its leadership, as it had in earlier years. The Soviets
resorted to occasional propaganda offensives, accusing West Germany
of revanchism and aggressive intentions in Eastern Europe, to
remind its allies of their ultimate dependence on Soviet protection
and to reinforce the Warsaw Pact's cohesion against the attraction
of good relations with the West.
Despite these problems, the détente period witnessed relatively
stable Soviet-East European relations within the Warsaw Pact.
In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union greatly expanded military
cooperation with the NSWP countries. The joint Warsaw Pact exercises,
conducted in the 1970s, gave the Soviet allies their first real
capability for offensive operations other than intra- bloc policing
actions. The East European countries also began to take an active
part in Soviet strategy in the Third World.
The Role of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries in the Third
World
With Eastern Europe in a relatively quiescent phase, the Soviet
Union began to build an informal alliance system in the Third
World during the 1970s. In this undertaking the Soviets drew on
their experiences in developing allies in Eastern Europe after
1945. Reflecting this continuity, the Soviet Union called its
new Third World allies "people's democracies" and their armed
forces "national liberation armies." The Soviets also drew on
their East European resources directly by enlisting the Warsaw
Pact allies as proxies to "enhance the role of socialism in world
affairs," that is, to support Soviet interests in the Middle East
and Africa. Since the late 1970s, the NSWP countries have been
active mainly in Soviet-allied Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya,
Mozambique, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen),
and Syria.
The Soviet Union employed its Warsaw Pact allies as surrogates
primarily because their activities would minimize the need for
direct Soviet involvement and obviate possible international criticism
of Soviet actions in the Third World. Avowedly independent East
European actions would be unlikely to precipitate or justify a
response by the United States. The Soviet Union also counted on
closer East European economic ties with Third World countries
to alleviate some of Eastern Europe's financial problems. From
the East European perspective, involvement in the Third World
offered an opportunity for reduced reliance on the Soviet Union
and for semiautonomous relations with other countries.
In the 1970s, the East European allies followed the lead of Soviet
diplomacy and signed treaties of friendship, cooperation, and
mutual assistance with most of the important Soviet Third World
allies. These treaties established a "socialist division of labor"
among the East European countries, in which each specialized in
the provision of certain aspects of military or economic assistance
to different Soviet Third World allies. The most important part
of the treaties concerned military cooperation; the Soviets have
openly acknowledged the important role of the East European allies
in providing weapons to the "national armies of countries with
socialist orientation."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany
were the principal Soviet proxies for arms transfers to the Third
World. These NSWP countries supplied Soviet-manufactured equipment,
spare parts, and training personnel to various Third World armies.
The Soviet Union used these countries to transship weapons to
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) in the early
1970s, Soviet-backed forces in the 1975 Angolan civil war, and
Nicaragua in the 1980s. The Soviet Union also relied on East German
advisers to set up armed militias, paramilitary police forces,
and internal security and intelligence organizations for selected
Third World allies. The Soviets considered this task especially
important because an efficient security apparatus would be essential
for suppressing opposition forces and keeping a ruling regime,
allied to the Soviet Union, in power. In addition to on- site
activities, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and particularly East Germany
trained Third World military and security personnel in Eastern
Europe during the 1980s. During this period, the Soviet Union
also relied on its East European allies to provide the bulk of
Soviet bloc economic aid and credits to the countries of the Third
World. Perhaps revealing their hesitancy about military activities
outside the Warsaw Pact's European operational area, Hungary and
Poland have confined their Third World involvement to commercial
assistance. Both countries sent economic and administrative advisers
to assist in the management of state- directed industrial enterprises
in the Third World as part of a Soviet campaign to demonstrate
the advantages of the "socialist path of development" to potential
Third World allies.
The Warsaw Pact has added no new member states in the more than
thirty years of its existence. Even at the height of its Third
World activities in the mid- to late 1970s, the Soviet Union did
not offer Warsaw Pact membership to any of its important Third
World allies. In 1986, after the United States bombed Libya in
retaliation for its support of international terrorism, the Soviet
Union was reported to have strongly discouraged Libyan interest
in Warsaw Pact membership, expressed through one or more NSWP
countries, and limited its support of Libya to bilateral consultations
after the raid. Having continually accused the United States of
attempting to extend NATO's sphere of activity beyond Europe,
the Soviets did not want to open themselves to charges of broadening
the Warsaw Pact. In any event, the Soviet Union would be unlikely
to accept a noncommunist, non-European state into the Warsaw Pact.
Moreover, the Soviets have already had considerable success in
establishing strong allies throughout the world, outside their
formal military alliance.
Beginning in the late 1970s, mounting economic problems sharply
curtailed the contribution of the East European allies to Soviet
Third World activities. In the early 1980s, when turmoil in Poland
reminded the Soviet Union that Eastern Europe remained its most
valuable asset, the Third World became a somewhat less important
object of Soviet attention.
The Solidarity Crisis
The rise of the independent trade union Solidarity shook the
foundation of communist party rule in Poland and, consequently,
Soviet control of a country the Soviet Union considers critical
to its security and alliance system. Given Poland's central geographic
position, this unrest threatened to isolate East Germany, sever
vital lines of communication to Soviet forces deployed against
NATO, and disrupt Soviet control in the rest of Eastern Europe.
As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union used the Warsaw
Pact to carry out a campaign of military coercion against the
Polish leadership. In 1980 and 1981, the Soviet Union conducted
joint Warsaw Pact exercises with a higher frequency than at any
time since 1968 to exert pressure on the Polish regime to solve
the Solidarity problem. Under the cover that the exercises afforded,
the Soviet Union mobilized and deployed its reserve and regular
troops in the Byelorussian Military District as a potential invasion
force. In the West-81 and Union-81 exercises, Soviet forces practiced
amphibious and airborne assault landings on the Baltic Sea coast
of Poland. These maneuvers demonstrated a ready Soviet capability
for intervention in Poland.
In the midst of the Polish crisis, Warsaw Pact commander in chief
Viktor Kulikov played a crucial role in intra-alliance diplomacy
on behalf of the Soviet leadership. Kulikov maintained almost
constant contact with the Polish leadership and conferred with
the leaders of Bulgaria, East Germany, and Romania about a possible
multilateral Warsaw Pact military action against Poland. In December
1981, Kulikov pressed Polish United Workers Party first secretary
Wojciech Jaruzelski to activate his contingency plan for declaring
martial law with the warning that the Soviet Union was ready to
intervene in the absence of quick action by Polish authorities.
As it turned out, the Polish government instituted martial law
and suppressed Solidarity just as the Soviet press was reporting
that these steps were necessary to ensure that Poland could meet
its Warsaw Pact commitment to the security of the other member
states.
From the Soviet perspective, the imposition of martial law by
Polish internal security forces was the best possible outcome.
Martial law made the suppression of Solidarity a strictly domestic
affair and spared the Soviet Union the international criticism
that an invasion would have generated. However, the use of the
extensive Polish paramilitary police and riot troops suggested
that the Soviet Union could not count on the Polish Army to put
down Polish workers. Moreover, while the Brezhnev Doctrine of
using force to maintain the leading role of the communist party
in society was upheld in Poland, it was not the Soviet Union that
enforced it.
Some question remains as to whether the Soviet Union could have
used force successfully against Poland. An invasion would have
damaged the Soviet Union's beneficial détente relationship with
Western Europe. Intervention would also have added to the evidence
that the internal police function of the Warsaw Pact was more
important than the putative external collective self-defense mission
it had never exercised. Moreover, Romania, and conceivably Hungary,
would have refused to contribute contingents to a multinational
Warsaw Pact force intended to camouflage a Soviet invasion. Failure
to gain the support of its allies would have represented a substantial
embarrassment to the Soviet Union. In stark contrast to the unopposed
intervention in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets probably also anticipated
tenacious resistance from the general population and the Polish
Army to any move against Poland. Finally, an invasion would have
placed a weighty economic and military burden on the Soviet Union;
the occupation and administration of Poland would have tied down
at least ten Soviet Army divisions for an extended period of time.
Nevertheless, had there been no other option, the Soviet Union
would certainly have invaded Poland to eliminate Solidarity's
challenge to communist party rule in that country.
Although the Polish Army had previously played an important role
in Soviet strategy for a coalition war against NATO, the Soviet
Union had to revise its plans and estimates of Poland's reliability
after 1981, and it turned to East Germany as its most reliable
ally. In the early 1980s, because of its eager promotion of Soviet
interests in the Third World and its importance in Soviet military
strategy, East Germany completed its transformation from defeated
enemy and dependent ally into the premier junior partner of the
Soviet Union. Ironically, East Germany's efficiency and loyalty
have made the Soviet Union uncomfortable. Encroaching somewhat
on the leading role of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact, East
Germany has been the only NSWP country to institute the rank of
marshal, matching the highest Soviet Army rank and implying its
equality with the Soviet Union.
The End of Détente
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the West grew disenchanted
with détente, which had failed to prevent Soviet advances in the
Third World, the deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic
missiles (IRBMs) aimed at West European targets, the invasion
of Afghanistan, or the suppression of Solidarity. The Soviet Union
used the renewal of East-West conflict as a justification for
forcing its allies to close ranks within the Warsaw Pact. But
restoring the alliance's cohesion and renewing its confrontation
with Western Europe proved difficult after several years of good
East-West relations. The East European countries had acquired
a stake in maintaining détente for various reasons. In the early
1980s, internal Warsaw Pact disputes centered on relations with
the West after détente, NSWP contributions to alliance defense
spending, and the alliance's reaction to IRBM deployments in NATO.
The resolution of these disputes produced significant changes
in the Warsaw Pact as, for the first time, two or more NSWP countries
simultaneously challenged Soviet military and foreign policy preferences
within the alliance.
In the PCC meetings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet
and East European leaders of the Warsaw Pact debated about the
threat emanating from NATO. When the Soviet Union argued that
a new cold war loomed over Europe, the East European countries
insisted that the improved European political climate of détente
still prevailed. On several occasions, the Soviets had to compromise
on the relative weight of these two alternatives in the language
of PCC declarations. Although the Soviet Union succeeded in officially
ending détente for the Warsaw Pact, it was unable to achieve significantly
greater alliance cohesion or integration.
Discussions of the "NATO threat" also played a large part in
Warsaw Pact debates about an appropriate level of NSWP military
expenditure. The Soviet Union used the 1978 PCC meeting to try
to force its allies to match a scheduled 3-percent, long-term
increase in the military budgets of the NATO countries. Although
the East European countries initially balked at this Soviet demand,
they eventually agreed to the increase. However, only East Germany
actually honored its pledge, and the Soviet Union failed to achieve
its goal of increased NSWP military spending.
The debate on alliance burden-sharing did not end in 1978. Beginning
in the late 1970s, the Soviets carefully noted that one of the
Warsaw Pact's most important functions was monitoring the "fraternal
countries and the fulfillment of their duties in the joint defense
of socialism." In 1983 Romania adopted a unilateral three-year
freeze on its military budget at its 1982 level. In 1985 Ceausescu
frustrated the Soviet Union by calling for a unilateral Warsaw
Pact reduction in arms expenditures, ostensibly to put pressure
on NATO to follow its example. At the same time, Hungary opposed
Soviet demands for increased spending, arguing instead for more
rational use of existing resources. In the mid-1980s, East Germany
was the only Soviet ally that continued to expand its military
spending.
The refusal of the NSWP countries to meet their Warsaw Pact financial
obligations in the 1980s clearly indicated diminished alliance
cohesion. The East European leaders argued that the costs of joint
exercises, their support for Soviet Army garrisons, and the drain
of conscription represented sufficient contributions to the alliance
at a time of hardship in their domestic economies. In addition
to providing access to bases and facilities opposite NATO, the
East European communist regimes were also obligated to abide by
Soviet foreign policy and security interests to earn a Soviet
guarantee against domestic challenges to their continued rule.
For its part, the Soviet Union paid a stiff price in terms of
economic aid and subsidized trade with the NSWP countries to maintain
its buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
The issue of an appropriate Warsaw Pact response to NATO's 1983
deployment of American Pershing II and cruise missiles, matching
the Soviet SS-20s, proved to be the most divisive one for the
Soviet Union and its East European allies in the early and mid-
1980s. After joining in a vociferous Soviet propaganda campaign
against the deployment, the East European countries split with
the Soviet Union over how to react when their "peace offensive"
failed to forestall it.
In 1983 East Germany, Hungary, and Romania indicated their intention
to "limit the damage" to East-West ties that could have resulted
from the deployment of NATO's new missiles. In doing so, these
countries raised the possibility of an independent role for the
smaller countries of both alliances in reducing conflicts between
the two superpowers. In particular, East Germany sought to insulate
its profitable economic ties with West Germany, established through
détente, against the general deterioration in East-West political
relations. While East Germany had always been the foremost proponent
of "socialist internationalism," that is, strict adherence to
Soviet foreign policy interests, its position on this issue caused
a rift in the Warsaw Pact. In effect, East Germany asserted that
the national interests of the East European countries did not
coincide exactly with those of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia attacked the East German
stand, accusing the improbable intra-bloc alliance of East Germany,
Hungary, and Romania of undermining the class basis of Warsaw
Pact foreign policy. The Soviet Union indicated that it would
not permit its allies to become mediators between East and West.
The Soviet Union forced East Germany to accept its "counterdeployments"
of SS- 21 and SS-23 SRBMs and compelled SED general secretary
Erich Honecker to cancel his impending visit to West Germany.
The Soviets thereby reaffirmed their right to determine the conditions
under which the Warsaw Pact member states would conduct relations
with the NATO countries. However, the Soviet Union also had to
forego any meeting of the PCC in 1984 that might have allowed
its recalcitrant allies to publicize their differences on this
issue.
As late as 1985, Soviet leaders still had not completely resolved
the question of the proper connection between the national and
international interests of the socialist countries. Some Soviet
commentators adopted a conciliatory approach toward the East European
position by stating that membership in the Warsaw Pact did not
erase a country's specific national interests, which could be
combined harmoniously with the common international interests
of all the member states. Others, however, simply repeated the
Brezhnev Doctrine and its stricture that a socialist state's sovereignty
involves not only the right to independence but also a responsibility
to the "socialist commonwealth" as a whole.
The Problem of Romania in the 1970s and 1980s
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was, tangentially,
a warning to Romania about its attempts to pursue genuine national
independence. But Ceausescu, in addition to refusing to contribute
Romanian troops to the Warsaw Pact invasion force, openly declared
that Romania would resist any similar Soviet intervention on its
territory. Romania pronounced that henceforth the Soviet Union
represented its most likely national security threat. After 1968
the Romanian Army accelerated its efforts to make its independent
defense strategy a credible deterrent to a possible Soviet invasion
of the country. In the 1970s Romania also established stronger
ties to the West, China, and the Third World. These diplomatic,
economic, and military relations were intended to increase Romania's
independence from the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, while
guaranteeing broad international support for Romania in the event
of a Soviet invasion.
Throughout the 1970s, Romania continued to reject military integration
within the Warsaw Pact framework and military intervention against
other member states, while insisting on the right of the East
European countries to resolve their internal problems without
Soviet interference. Romanian objections to the Soviet line within
the Warsaw Pact forced the Soviet Union to acknowledge the "possibility
of differences arising in the views of the ruling communist parties
on the assessment of some international developments." To obtain
Romanian assent on several questions, the Soviet Union also had
to substitute the milder formulation "international solidarity"
for "socialist internationalism"--the code phrase for the subordination
of East European national interests to Soviet interests--in PCC
declarations. Pursuing a policy opposed to close alliance integration,
Romania resisted Soviet domination of Warsaw Pact weapons production
as a threat to its autonomy and refused to participate in the
work of the Military Scientific-Technical Council and Technical
Committee (see The Military Organization of the Warsaw Pact, this
Appendix). Nevertheless, the Soviets have insisted that a Romanian
Army officer holds a position on the Technical Committee; his
rank, however, is not appropriate to that level of responsibility.
The Soviet claims are probably intended to obscure the fact that
Romania does not actually engage in joint Warsaw Pact weapons
production efforts.
Despite continued Romanian defiance of Soviet policies in the
Warsaw Pact during the 1980s, the Soviet Union successfully exploited
Romania's severe economic problems and bribed Romania with energy
supplies on several occasions to gain its assent, or at least
silence, in the Warsaw Pact. Although Romania raised the price
the Soviet Union had to pay to bring it into line, Romanian dependence
on Soviet economic support may foreshadow Romania's transformation
into a more cooperative Warsaw Pact ally. Moreover, in 1985 Ceausescu
dismissed Minister of Foreign Affairs Stefan Andrei and Minister
of Defense Constantin Olteanu, who helped establish the country's
independent policies and would have opposed closer Romanian involvement
with the Warsaw Pact.
The Renewal of the Alliance
In his first important task after becoming general secretary
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, Mikhail
S. Gorbachev organized a meeting of the East European leaders
to renew the Warsaw Pact, which was due to expire that May after
thirty years. There was little doubt that the Warsaw Pact member
states would renew the alliance. However, there was some speculation
that the Soviet Union might unilaterally dismantle its formal
alliance structure to improve the Soviet image in the West and
put pressure on NATO to disband. The Soviets could still have
relied on the network of bilateral treaties in Eastern Europe,
which predated the formation of the Warsaw Pact and had been renewed
regularly. Combined with later status-of-forces agreements, these
treaties ensured that the essence of the Soviet alliance system
and buffer zone in Eastern Europe would remain intact, regardless
of the Warsaw Pact's status. But despite their utility, the bilateral
treaties could never substitute for the Warsaw Pact. Without a
formal alliance, the Soviet Union would have to coordinate foreign
policy and military integration with its East European allies
through cumbersome bilateral arrangements. Without the Warsaw
Pact, the Soviet Union would have no political equivalent of NATO
for international negotiations like the CSCE and Mutual and Balanced
Force Reduction talks, or for issuing its arms control pronouncements.
The Soviet Union would also have to give up its equal status with
the United States as an alliance leader.
Although the Soviet and East European leaders debated the terms
of the Warsaw Pact's renewal at their April 1985 meeting--Ceausescu
reportedly proposed that it be renewed for a shorter period--they
did not change the original 1955 document, or the alliance's structure,
in any way. The Soviets concluded that this outcome proved that
the Warsaw Pact truly embodied the "fundamental long- term interests
of the fraternal countries." The decision to leave the Warsaw
Pact unamended was probably the easiest alternative for the Soviet
Union and its allies; the alliance was renewed for another twenty-year
term with an automatic ten-year extension.
In the mid- to late 1980s, the future of the Warsaw Pact hinged
on Gorbachev's developing policy toward Eastern Europe. At the
Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
in 1986, Gorbachev acknowledged that differences existed among
the Soviet allies and that it would be unrealistic to expect them
to have identical views on all issues. There has been no firm
indication, as yet, of whether Gorbachev would be willing to grant
the Soviet allies more policy latitude or insist on tighter coordination
with the Soviet Union. However, demonstrating a greater sensitivity
to East European concerns than previous Soviet leaders, Gorbachev
briefed the NSWP leaders in their own capitals after the 1985
Geneva and 1986 Reykjavik superpower summit meetings.
According to many Western analysts, mounting economic difficulties
in the late 1980s and the advanced age of trusted, long-time communist
party leaders, like Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia, Todor Zhivkov
in Bulgaria, and Janos Kadar in Hungary, presented the danger
of domestic turmoil and internal power struggles in the NSWP countries.
These problems had the potential to monopolize Soviet attention
and constrain Soviet global activities. But the Soviet Union could
turn these potential crises into opportunities, using its economic
leverage to pressure its East European allies to adhere more closely
to Soviet positions or to influence the political succession process
to ensure that a new generation of leaders in Eastern Europe would
respect Soviet interests. Soviet insistence on greater NSWP military
spending could fuel further economic deterioration, leading to
political unrest and even threats to the integrity of the Soviet
alliance system in several countries simultaneously. Conversely,
limited, Soviet-sanctioned deviation from orthodox socialism could
make the East European regimes more secure and reduce the Soviet
burden of policing the Warsaw Pact.
SOVIET MILITARY STRATEGY AND THE WARSAW PACT
The Soviet ground forces constitute the bulk of the Warsaw Pact's
military power. In 1987 the Soviet Union provided 73 of the 126
Warsaw Pact tank and motorized rifle divisions. Located in the
Soviet Groups of Forces (SGFs) and four westernmost military districts
of the Soviet Union, these Soviet Army divisions comprise the
majority of the Warsaw Pact's combat-ready, full-strength units.
Looking at the numbers of Soviet troops stationed in or near Eastern
Europe, and the historical record, one could conclude that the
Warsaw Pact is only a Soviet mechanism for organizing intra- alliance
interventions or maintaining control of Eastern Europe and does
not significantly augment Soviet offensive power vis-ŕ-vis NATO.
Essentially a peacetime structure for NSWP training and mobilization,
the Warsaw Pact has no independent role in wartime nor a military
strategy distinct from Soviet military strategy. However, the
individual NSWP armies play important parts in Soviet strategy
for war, outside the formal context of the Warsaw Pact.
Soviet Military Strategy
The goal of Soviet military strategy in Europe is a quick victory
over NATO in a nonnuclear war. The Soviet Union would attempt
to defeat NATO decisively before its political and military command
structure could consult and decide how to respond to an attack.
Under this strategy, success would hinge on inflicting a rapid
succession of defeats on NATO to break its will to fight, knock
some of its member states out of the war, and cause the collapse
of the Western alliance. A quick victory would also keep the United
States from escalating the conflict to the nuclear level by making
retaliation against the Soviet Union futile. A rapid defeat of
NATO would preempt the mobilization of its superior industrial
and economic resources, as well as reinforcement from the United
States, which would enable NATO to prevail in a longer war. Most
significant, in a strictly conventional war the Soviet Union could
conceivably capture its objective, the economic potential of Western
Europe, relatively intact.
In the 1970s, Soviet nuclear force developments increased the
likelihood that a European war would remain on the conventional
level. By matching the United States in intercontinental ballistic
missiles and adding intermediate-range SS-20s to its nuclear forces,
the Soviet Union undercut NATO's option to employ nuclear weapons
to avoid defeat in a conventional war. After the United States
neutralized the Soviet SS-20 IRBM advantage by deploying Pershing
II and cruise missiles, the Soviet Union tried to use its so-called
"counterdeployments" of SS-21 and SS-23 SRBMs to gain a nuclear-war
fighting edge in the European theater. At the same time, the Soviet
Union made NATO's dependence on nuclear weapons less tenable by
issuing Warsaw Pact proposals for mutual no-first- use pledges
and the establishment of nuclear-free zones.
The Soviet plan for winning a conventional war quickly to preclude
the possibility of a nuclear response by NATO and the United States
was based on the deep-strike concept Soviet military theoreticians
first proposed in the 1930s. After 1972 the Soviet Army put deep
strike into practice in annual joint Warsaw Pact exercises, including
"Brotherhood-in-Arms," "Union," "Friendship," "West," and "Shield."
Deep strike would carry an attack behind the front lines of battle,
far into NATO's rear areas. The Soviet Union would launch simultaneous
missile and air strikes against vital NATO installations to disrupt
or destroy the Western alliance's early warning surveillance systems,
command and communications network, and nuclear delivery systems.
Following this initial strike, the modern-day successor of the
World War II-era Soviet mobile group formations, generated out
of the SGFs in Eastern Europe, would break through and encircle
NATO's prepared defenses in order to isolate its forward forces
from reinforcement. Consisting of two or more tank and motorized
rifle divisions, army- level mobile groups would also overrun
important NATO objectives behind the front lines to facilitate
the advance of Soviet follow- on forces, which would cross NSWP
territory from the westernmost Soviet military districts.
The Warsaw Pact countries provide forward bases, staging areas,
and interior lines of communication for the Soviet Union against
NATO. Peacetime access to East European territory under the Warsaw
Pact framework has enabled the Soviet military to pre-position
troops, equipment, and supplies and to make reinforcement plans
for wartime. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union increased road and
rail capacity and built new airfields and pipelines in Eastern
Europe. However, a quick Soviet victory through deep strike could
be complicated by the fact that the attacking forces would have
to achieve almost total surprise. Past Soviet mobilizations for
relatively small actions in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, and Poland
took an average of ninety days, while United States satellites
observed the entire process. Moreover, the advance notification
of large-scale troop movements, required under agreements made
at the CSCE, would also complicate the concealment of mobilization.
Yet the Soviet Union could disguise its offensive deployments
against NATO as semi annual troop rotations in the GSFG, field
exercises, or preparations for intervention against an ally.
The Role of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries in Soviet Military
Strategy
The Warsaw Pact has no multilateral command or decision-making
structure independent of the Soviet Army. NSWP forces would fight
in Soviet, rather than joint Warsaw Pact, military operations.
Soviet military writings about the alliances of World War I and
World War II, as well as numerous recent works marking the thirtieth
anniversary of the Warsaw Pact in 1985, reveal the current Soviet
view of coalition warfare. The Warsaw Pact's chief of staff, A.
I. Gribkov, has written that centralized strategic control, like
that the Red Army exercised over the allied East European national
units between 1943 and 1945 is valid today for the Warsaw Pact's
JAF (see The Organization of East European National Units, 1943-45,
this Appendix).
Soviet military historians indicate that the East European allies
did not establish or direct operations on independent national
fronts during World War II. The East European forces fought in
units, at and below the army level, on Soviet fronts and under
the Soviet command structure. The headquarters of the Soviet Supreme
High Command exercised control over all allied units through the
Soviet General Staff. At the same time, the commanders in chief
of the allied countries were attached to and "advised" the Soviet
Supreme High Command. There were no special coalition bodies to
make joint decisions on operational problems. A chart adapted
from a Soviet journal indicates that the Soviet-directed alliance
in World War II lacked a multilateral command structure independent
of the Red Army's chain of command, an arrangement that also reflects
the current situation in the Warsaw Pact (see fig. C, this Appendix).
The Warsaw Pact's lack of a wartime command structure independent
of the Soviet command structure is clear evidence of the subordination
of the NSWP armies to the Soviet Army.
Since the early 1960s, the Soviet Union has used the Warsaw Pact
to prepare non-Soviet forces to take part in Soviet Army operations
in the European theater of war. In wartime the Warsaw Pact commander
in chief and chief of staff would transfer NSWP forces, mobilized
and deployed under the Warsaw Pact aegis, to the operational control
of the Soviet ground forces. After deployment the Soviet Union
could employ NSWP armies, comprised of various East European divisions,
on its fronts (see Glossary). In joint Warsaw Pact exercises,
the Soviet Union has detached carefully selected, highly reliable
East European units, at and below the division-level, from their
national command structures. These specific contingents are trained
for offensive operations within Soviet ground forces divisions.
NSWP units, integrated in this manner, would fight as component
parts of Soviet armies on Soviet fronts.
The East European countries play specific roles in Soviet strategy
against NATO based on their particular military capabilities.
Poland has the largest and best NSWP air force that the Soviet
Union could employ in a theater air offensive. Both Poland and
East Germany have substantial naval forces that, in wartime, would
revert to the command of the Soviet Baltic Fleet to render fire
support for Soviet ground operations. These two Soviet allies
also have amphibious forces that could carry out assault landings
along the Baltic Sea coast into NATO's rear areas. While its mobile
groups would penetrate deep into NATO territory, the Soviet Union
would entrust the less reliable or capable East European armies,
like those of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, with a basically
defensive mission. The East European countries are responsible
for securing their territory, Soviet rear areas, and lines of
communication. The air defense systems of all NSWP countries are
linked directly into the Soviet Air Defense Forces command. This
gives the Soviet Union an impressive early warning network against
NATO air attacks.
The Reliability of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Armies
The Soviet Union counts on greater cooperation from its Warsaw
Pact allies in a full-scale war with NATO than in intra-alliance
policing actions. Nevertheless, the Soviets expect that a protracted
war in Europe would strain the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact. This
view may derive from the experience of World War II, in which
Nazi Germany's weak alliance partners, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria,
left the war early and eventually joined the Soviet side. A stalemate
in a protracted European war could lead to unrest, endanger communist
party control in Eastern Europe, and fracture the entire Soviet
alliance system. NSWP reliability would also decline, requiring
the Soviet Army to reassign its own forces to carry out unfulfilled
NSWP functions or even to occupy a noncompliant ally's territory.
Continuing Soviet concern over the combat reliability of its
East European allies influences, to a great extent, the employment
of NSWP forces under Soviet strategy. Soviet military leaders
believe that the Warsaw Pact allies would be most likely to remain
loyal if the Soviet Army engaged in a short, successful offensive
against NATO, while deploying NSWP forces defensively. Under this
scenario, the NSWP allies would absorb the brunt of NATO attacks
against Soviet forces on East European territory. Fighting in
Eastern Europe would reinforce the impression among the NSWP countries
that their actions constituted a legitimate defense against outside
attack. The Soviet Union would still have to be selective in deploying
the allied armies offensively. For example, the Soviet Union would
probably elect to pit East German forces against non-German NATO
troops along the central front. Other NSWP forces that the Soviet
Union employed offensively would probably be interspersed with
Soviet units on Soviet fronts to increase their reliability. The
Soviet Union would not establish separate East European national
fronts against NATO. Independent NSWP fronts would force the Soviet
Union to rely too heavily on its allies to perform well in wartime.
Moreover, independent East European fronts could serve as the
basis for a territorial defense strategy and successful resistance
to future Soviet policing actions in Eastern Europe.
Soviet concern over the reliability of its Warsaw Pact allies
is also reflected in the alliance's military-technical policy,
which is controlled by the Soviets. The Soviet Union has given
the East European allies less modern, though still effective,
weapons and equipment to keep their armies several steps behind
the Soviet Army. The Soviets cannot modernize the East European
armies without concomitantly improving their capability to resist
Soviet intervention.
MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND THE WARSAW PACT
As a result of its preponderance in the alliance, the Soviet
Union has imposed a level of standardization in the Warsaw Pact
that NATO cannot match. Standardization in NATO focuses primarily
on the compatibility of ammunition and communications equipment
among national armies. By contrast, the Soviet concept of standardization
involves a broad complex of measures aimed at achieving "unified
strategic views on the general character of a future war and the
capabilities for conducting it." The Soviet Union uses the Warsaw
Pact framework to bring its allies into line with its view of
strategy, operations, tactics, organizational structure, service
regulations, field manuals, documents, staff procedures, and maintenance
and supply activities.
The Weapons and Equipment of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Armies
By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved a degree of technical
interoperability among the allied armies that some observers would
consider to be a significant military advantage over NATO. However,
the Soviet allies had weapons and equipment that were both outdated
and insufficient in number. As one Western analyst has pointed
out, the NSWP armies remain fully one generation behind the Soviet
Union in their inventories of modern equipment and weapons systems
and well below Soviet norms in force structure quantities. Although
T-64 and T-72 tanks had become standard and modern infantry combat
vehicles, including the BMP-1, comprised two-thirds of the armored
infantry vehicles in Soviet Army units deployed in Eastern Europe,
the NSWP armies still relied primarily on older T-54 and T-55
tanks and domestically produced versions of Soviet BTR-50 and
BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. The East European air forces
did not receive the MiG-23, first built in 1971, until the late
1970s, and they still did not have the most modern Soviet ground
attack fighter-bombers, like the MiG- 25, MiG-27, and Su-24, in
the mid- to late 1980s. These deficiencies called into question
NSWP capabilities for joining in Soviet offensive operations against
NATO and indicated primarily a rear-area role for the NSWP armies
in Soviet strategy.
Within the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union decides which of the
allies receive the most up-to-date weapons. Beginning in the late
1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet Union provided the strategically
located Northern Tier countries, East Germany and Poland especially,
with greater quantities of advanced armaments. By contrast, the
less important Southern Tier, consisting of Hungary, Bulgaria
and Romania, received used equipment that was being replaced in
Soviet or Northern Tier forces. In the mid-1970s, overall NSWP
force development slowed suddenly as the Soviet Union became more
interested in selling arms to earn hard currency and gain greater
influence in the Third World, particularly in the oil- rich Arab
states of the Middle East. At the same time, growing economic
problems in Eastern Europe made many Third World countries look
like better customers for Soviet arms sales. Between 1974 and
1978, the Soviet Union sent the equivalent of US$18.5 million
of a total US$27 million in arms transfers outside the Warsaw
Pact. Moreover, massive Soviet efforts to replace heavy Arab equipment
losses in the 1973 war against Israel and the 1982 Syrian-Israeli
air war over Lebanon came largely at the expense of modernization
for the East European allies. In the late 1980s, the NSWP countries
clearly resented the fact that some Soviet Third World allies,
including Algeria, Libya, and Syria, had taken delivery of the
newest Soviet weapons systems, such as the MiG-25, not yet in
their own inventories. The Soviet Union probably looked at a complete
modernization program for the NSWP armies as unnecessary and prohibitively
costly for either it or its allies to undertake.
Coordination of Arms Production
The Soviet Union claims the right to play the leading role in
the Warsaw Pact on the basis of its scientific, technical, and
economic preponderance in the alliance. The Soviet Union also
acknowledges its duty to cooperate with the NSWP countries by
sharing military-technical information and developing their local
defense industries. This cooperation, however, amounts to Soviet
control over the supply of major weapons systems and is an important
aspect of Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact allies. Warsaw
Pact military-technical cooperation prevents the NSWP countries
from adopting autonomous policies or otherwise defying Soviet
interests through a national defense capability based on domestic
arms production. In discussions of the United States and NATO,
the Soviets acknowledge that standardization and control of arms
purchases are effective in increasing the influence of the leading
member of an alliance over its smaller partners. In the same way,
Soviet arms supplies to Eastern Europe have made the NSWP military
establishments more dependent on the Soviet Union. To deny its
allies the military capability to successfully resist a Soviet
invasion, the Soviet Union does not allow the NSWP countries to
produce sufficient quantities or more than a few kinds of weapons
for their national armies.
Romania is the only Warsaw Pact country that has escaped Soviet
military-technical domination. In the late 1960s, Romania recognized
the danger of depending on the Soviet Union as its sole source
of military equipment and weapons. As a result, Romania initiated
heavy domestic production of relatively low-technology infantry
weapons and began to seek non-Soviet sources for more advanced
armaments. Romania has produced British transport aircraft, Chinese
fast-attack boats, and French helicopters under various coproduction
and licensing arrangements. Romania has also produced a fighter-bomber
jointly with Yugoslavia. However, Romania still remains backward
in its military technology because both the Soviet Union and Western
countries are reluctant to transfer their most modern weapons
to it. Each side must assume that any technology given to Romania
could end up in enemy hands.
Apart from Romania, the Soviet Union benefits from the limited
military production of its East European allies. It has organized
an efficient division of labor among the NSWP countries in this
area. Czechoslovakia and East Germany, in particular, are heavily
industrialized and probably surpass the Soviet Union in their
high- technology capabilities. The Northern Tier countries produce
some Soviet heavy weapons, including older tanks, artillery, and
infantry combat vehicles on license. However, the Soviet Union
generally restricts its allies to the production of a relatively
narrow range of military equipment, including small arms, munitions,
communications, radar, optical, and other precision instruments
and various components and parts for larger Soviet- designed weapons
systems.
* * *
The 1980s have witnessed a dramatic increase in the amount of
secondary source material published about the Warsaw Pact. The
works of Alex Alexiev, Andrzej Korbonski, and Condoleezza Rice,
as well as various Soviet writers, provide a complete picture
of the Soviet alliance system and the East European military establishments
before the formation of the Warsaw Pact. William J. Lewis's The
Warsaw Pact: Arms, Doctrine, and Strategy is a very useful
reference work with considerable information on the establishment
of the Warsaw Pact and the armies of its member states. The works
of Malcolm Mackintosh, a long-time observer of the Warsaw Pact,
cover the changes in the Warsaw Pact's organizational structure
and functions through the years. Christopher D. Jones's Soviet
Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw
Pact and subsequent articles provide a coherent interpretation
of the Soviet Union's use of the Warsaw Pact to control its East
European allies. In "The Warsaw Pact at 25," Dale R. Herspring
examines intra-alliance politics in the PCC and East European
attempts to reduce Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet
military journals are the best source for insights into the East
European role in Soviet military strategy. Daniel N. Nelson and
Ivan Volgyes analyze East European reliability in the Warsaw Pact.
Nelson takes a quantitative approach to this ephemeral topic.
By contrast, Volgyes uses a historical and political framework
to draw his conclusions on the reliability issue. The works of
Richard C. Martin and Daniel S. Papp present thorough discussions
of Soviet policies on arming and equipping the NSWP allies. (For
further information and complete citations, see Bibliography.)
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