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Romania The Warsaw Pact
In the late 1950s, Romania curbed excessive Soviet
influence
over its armed forces, built up in the years after World
War II,
and ceased sending its officers to the Soviet Union for
military
education and training. After 1962 it did not allow Warsaw
Pact
troop maneuvers on its territory, although occasional
command and
staff exercises were permitted. In November 1964, PCR
General
Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej announced a unilateral
reduction
in the term of compulsory military service from two years
to
sixteen months and in the size of the Romanian armed
forces from
240,000 to 200,000 soldiers. His successor, Ceausescu,
openly
asserted that these moves reflected the precedence of
Romanian
national interests over Warsaw Pact requirements. He
criticized
Soviet domination of the alliance, its command, and policy
making,
and he called for structural changes in the Warsaw Pact,
to include
rotating the position of commander-in-chief of the joint
armed
forces among non-Soviet officers and allowing the
non-Soviet Warsaw
Pact member states a bigger role in decision making. In
the late
1960s, Romanian forces essentially quit participating in
joint
Warsaw Pact field exercises except for sending staff
officers to
observe them, and Ceausescu announced that Romania would
no longer
put its military forces under the Warsaw Pact's joint
command, even
during peacetime maneuvers.
In the midst of the 1968 "Prague Spring" crisis over
internal
political liberalization in Czechoslovakia, Ceausescu
traveled to
Prague to demonstrate his support for party First
Secretary
Alexander Dubcek and Czechoslovakian autonomy. Romania
declined to
join the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
or to
allow Bulgarian forces to cross its territory to intervene
in
Czechoslovakia. At a massive demonstration in Bucharest on
the day
after the invasion, Ceausescu denounced the intervention
as a
violation of Czechoslovakia's national sovereignty,
international
law, and the terms of the Warsaw Pact itself. He declared
that,
unlike Czechoslovakia, Romania would resist a similar
invasion of
its territory, and he placed Romanian forces on alert
status. He
established the paramilitary Patriotic Guards with an
initial
strength of 100,000 citizens to provide a mechanism for
the
participation of the country's population in a system of
total
national defense. Later in August, major troop movements
along
Romania's borders with the Soviet Union, Hungary, and
Bulgaria
indicated a similar threat of intervention in Romania.
These
threatening movements may have been intended to intimidate
Ceausescu, who was conferring with Yugoslavian leader
Josip Broz
Tito at the time.
Determined to prevent alliance maneuvers from serving
as a
vehicle for intervention in Romania, Ceausescu refused to
allow
Warsaw Pact exercises on Romanian territory in the wake of
the 1968
action against Czechoslovakia. After its deviation from
the common
alliance line on Czechoslovakia, Romania became the object
of
several joint Warsaw Pact maneuvers conducted near its
borders that
were designed to pressure it politically. These exercises
coincided
with other major displays of Romanian independence from
the Warsaw
Pact.
Shortly before Ceausescu visited China in June 1971,
the
Soviet Union mounted a major exercise on its southern
border with
Romania. During "South-71," as the exercise was called,
the Soviet
Union mobilized twelve ground forces divisions, and the
Soviet
Black Sea Fleet operated off the Romanian coast. It
requested, but
Romania denied, permission to transport three divisions
across
Romania to Bulgaria for the maneuvers. South-71 was an
indication
of Soviet displeasure with Ceausescu for making the first
visit to
China by a Warsaw Pact head of state since the Sino-Soviet
split in
the late 1950s and for maintaining good relations with its
communist rival. South-71 forced Romania into a partial
mobilization but did not disrupt Ceausescu's trip to
China.
Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian units conducted the
"Opal-71"
exercises along Hungary's border with Romania in August
1971.
Ceausescu's failure to travel to the Crimea for a summer
meeting
with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, customary for East
European
leaders, may have been related to the military activity
along
Romania's borders.
Throughout the remainder of the 1970s and during the
1980s,
Romania continued and further developed its autonomous
position in
the Warsaw Pact. It refused to allow Soviet forces to
traverse
Romanian territory to Bulgaria for joint Warsaw Pact
maneuvers. In
1974 Romania denied a Soviet request to construct a
broad-gauge
railroad from Odessa across eastern Romania to Varna,
Bulgaria,
that could be used to transport major troop units.
Romania's stance
against the use of its territory by allied forces
effectively
isolated Bulgaria from the other Warsaw Pact countries
except by
air or sea transport.
Romania continued to participate fully in formal
alliance
political meetings in which it could publicly express its
views,
assert its interests, and influence the formulation of
official
Warsaw Pact statements and documents. It openly adopted
positions
different from those of the Soviet Union. Romanian demands
for
genuine consultation and greater Eastern European input
into
decision making resulted in the establishment of the
Council of
Foreign Ministers in 1976 and other formal deliberative
bodies
within the Warsaw Pact. Romania used these consultative
mechanisms
to publicize its disagreements with the Soviet Union over
alliance
policy. In 1978 it publicly opposed Soviet initiatives to
achieve
tighter military integration in the Warsaw Pact and to
increase the
military expenditures of the Warsaw Pact member states. In
1980
Romania refused to support the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan when
it abstained instead of voting against the United Nations
General
Assembly resolution condemning the Soviet action. It later
openly
called on the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan.
In 1984
Romania publicly opposed the Soviet decision to deploy
short-range
ballistic missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia to
counter
the 1983 NATO deployment of intermediate nuclear forces
(INF) in
Western Europe.
Romania remained a Warsaw Pact member state in 1989,
but
retained its well-established reputation as a maverick
within the
Soviet alliance. It maximized its autonomy within the
boundaries
of the Warsaw Pact, minimized its participation, and
avoided an
outright withdrawal from the alliance, which the Soviet
Union would
not have tolerated. The Soviet Union countenanced these
displays of
independence because, as part of the Warsaw Pact's
southern tier,
Romania had a less strategic location than East Germany,
Poland,
Czechoslovakia, or Hungary; it did not border on a NATO
country;
and it retained its rigid internal communist regime.
Data as of July 1989
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