APPENDIX C: THE WARSAW PACT -- Soviet Union
THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY ALLIANCE of the Soviet Union and
East European socialist states, known as the Warsaw Pact, was
formed in 1955 as a counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), created in 1949. During much of its early
existence, the Warsaw Pact essentially functioned as part of the
Soviet Ministry of Defense. In fact, in the early years of its
existence the Warsaw Pact 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 used the Warsaw
Pact to erect a facade of collective decisions and actions 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 used the Warsaw Pact to develop East European
socialist armies and harness them to its military strategy and
security policy.
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 evolved into
something other than the mechanism of control the Soviet Union
originally intended it to be and, since the 1960s, has become
less dominated by the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1962 Albania stopped
participating in Warsaw Pact activities and formally withdrew
from the alliance in 1968. The organizational structure of the
Warsaw Pact also 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. At
the same time that the Warsaw Pact has retained its internal
function in Soviet-East European relations, its non-Soviet
members have developed sufficient military capabilities to become
useful adjuncts of Soviet power against NATO in Europe (see fig.
A, this Appendix).
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 (see Glossary)
established political and military control over that region. 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 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 1943 the Red Army had destroyed the
Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Romanian forces fighting alongside the
German armed forces. 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. Red Army
political officers (zampoliti--see Glossary) 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 twenty-nine
divisions and thirty-seven brigades and regiments, which included
more than 500,000 East European troops.
The allied national formations were directly subordinate to
the headquarters of the Soviet Union's Supreme High Command and
its executive body, the General Staff of the Armed Forces.
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 German armed forces only as part of Soviet
fronts.
By the end of World War II, the Red Army (renamed the Soviet
army after the war) occupied Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland,
significant portions of Czechoslovakia, 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 in 1947 and the Group of Soviet
Forces in Germany 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, which granted the Soviet Union rights to a continued
military presence on their territory. The continued presence of
Soviet armed forces guaranteed Soviet control of these countries.
The East European satellite regimes depended entirely on Soviet
military power--and the continued deployment of 1 million Soviet
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. 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.
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 Soviet Union assigned trusted communist
party leaders of the East European nations to the most important
military command positions despite their lack of military
qualifications. It forced its East European allies to emulate
Soviet military 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 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. Furthermore, the East European
ministries of defense established political departments on the
model of the Soviet Union's Main Political Directorate of the
Soviet Army and Navy.
The Formation of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-70
On May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union institutionalized its East
European alliance system, henceforth known as the Warsaw Pact,
when it met with representatives from Albania, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania in Warsaw to sign
the multilateral Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual
Assistance, which was identical to their existing bilateral
treaties with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union claimed that the
creation of the Warsaw Pact was in direct response to the
inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in
NATO in 1955. At the same time, the formation of a legally
defined, multilateral alliance reinforced the Soviet Union's
claim to be leader of the world socialist system (see Glossary),
enhanced its prestige, and legitimized its presence and influence
in Eastern Europe. The new alliance system also gave the Soviet
Union a structure for dealing with its East European allies more
efficiently when it superimposed the multilateral Warsaw Pact on
their existing bilateral treaty ties. Finally, as a formal
organization the Warsaw Pact provided the Soviet Union an
official counterweight to NATO in East-West diplomacy.
The 1955 treaty establishing 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.
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 Nikita S.
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. In 1956 the Warsaw Pact
member states admitted East Germany to the Joint Command and
sanctioned the transformation of East Germany's 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.
In his 1956 "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Khrushchev
denounced the arbitrariness, excesses, and terror of the Joseph
K. 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. Responding to East European demands for greater political
autonomy, Khrushchev accepted the replacement of Stalinist Polish
and Hungarian leaders with newly rehabilitated (see Glossary)
communist party figures, who were able to generate genuine
popular support for their regimes. He sought to turn Soviet-
controlled East European satellites into at least semiautonomous
countries and to make Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact less
obvious. He allowed the East European armies to restore their
distinctive national practices and to reemphasize 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.
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 and led to a significant change
in the role of the Warsaw Pact as an element of Soviet security.
The Polish October
The Polish government's handling of the workers' riots in
Poland in October 1956 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. Poland's new communist
party leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, and the Polish People's 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's position permitted the Soviet Union to
redefine the minimum requirements for its 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 the Soviet Union's most vital interests would be
protected and 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. Initial domestic liberalization acceptable to the
Soviet Union quickly escalated to nonnegotiable issues like
challenging the communist party's exclusive hold on political
power and establishing genuine national independence. Imre Nagy,
the new communist party leader, 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 People's 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 forces stationed in Hungary officially became
the Southern Group of Forces.
The events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary forced a Soviet
reevaluation of the reliability and roles of the Non-Soviet
Warsaw Pact (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. After 1956 the Soviet Union increasingly suspected
that the East European armies were likely to remain loyal to
national causes.
A Shift Toward Greater Cohesion
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. Although Khrushchev had 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 Soviet Union took
steps to turn the alliance's armed forces into a multinational
intervention 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. By presenting future
policing actions as the product of joint Warsaw Pact decisions,
the Soviet Union hoped to deflect the kind of direct
international criticism the Soviet Union was subjected to after
the invasion of Hungary. Such internal deployments, however, 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
Soviet Union merely redefined external aggression to include any
spontaneous anti-Soviet, anticommunist uprising in an allied
state.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union began to take 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. Military exercises with Soviet forces and
the allied national armies became the primary focus of Warsaw
Pact military activities.
The Soviet Union planned 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. A series of joint Warsaw Pact exercises, organized and
controlled by the Soviet Union, was intended to prevent other
East European national command authorities from following the
example of Yugoslavia and Albania and adopting a territorial
defense strategy.
The Prague Spring
In 1968 an acute crisis in the Soviet alliance system
suddenly occurred. 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. 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.
Once again, the Soviet Union felt it necessary to forestall the
spread of liberalization and to assert its right to enforce the
boundaries of ideological permissibility in Eastern Europe. This
concern was the major factor in the Soviet Union's decision to
invade Czechoslovakia in 1968. 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 Union's General Staff to execute its plan for the
invasion without alerting Western governments. Under the pretext
of conducting 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 with 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
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 the 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 divisions remained in Czechoslovakia to
protect the country from future "imperialist threats." These
troops became the Central Group of Forces and added to Soviet
strength directly bordering NATO member states. The Czechoslovak
People's 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
reeducation campaign in the Czechoslovak People's Army and cut
its size. With its one-time closest 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 Warsaw Pact action during the 1968
crisis because a formal session would have revealed a deep rift
in the Warsaw Pact alliance and given Czechoslovakia an
international platform from which it could have defended its
reform program.
While the participation of four NSWP armies in the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia ostensibly demonstrated considerable
Warsaw Pact cohesion, the invasion also served to erode it. The
invasion of Czechoslovakia proved that the Warsaw Pact's mission
of keeping orthodox East European communist party regimes in
power--and less orthodox ones in line--was more important than
the 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 Brezhnev Doctrine (see Glossary) 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.
The Romanian leader, Nicolae 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.
In 1968, following the Warsaw Pact's invasion of
Czechoslovakia, Romania demanded the withdrawal from its
territory of all Soviet troops, advisers, and the Soviet resident
representative. 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. Following
the lead of Yugoslavia and Albania, Romania reasserted full
national control over its armed forces and military policies by
adopting a territorial defense strategy called "War of the Entire
People," whose aim was to end Soviet domination and to guard
against Soviet encroachments.
Organization and Strategy of the Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact administered both the political and the
military activities of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern
Europe. A series of changes that began in 1969 gave the Warsaw
Pact the structure it retained through the late 1980s.
Political Organization
The general (or first) secretaries of the communist and
workers' parties and heads of state of the Warsaw Pact member
states met in the PCC. The PCC provided 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 was charged with
assessing international developments that affected the security
of the allied states and warranted the execution of the Warsaw
Pact's collective self-defense provisions. In practice, however,
the Soviet Union was unwilling to rely on the PCC to perform this
function, fearing that Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania would
use PCC meetings to oppose Soviet plans and policies. The PCC was
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 Soviet domination and assert more independent foreign
policies, the Soviet Union has had to 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 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 represented another layer of alliance coordination. The
ministers were tasked with resolving alliance problems at these
working levels so that they would not erupt into embarrassing
disputes between the Soviet and East European leaders at PCC
meetings.
Military Organization
The Warsaw Pact's military organization was larger and more
active than the alliance's political bodies. Several different
organizations were responsible for implementing PCC directives on
defense matters and developing the capabilities of the national
armies that constituted the Warsaw Pact's armed forces. The
principal task, however, of the military organizations was to
link the East European armies to the Soviet armed forces. The
alliance's military agencies coordinated the training and
mobilization of the East European national forces assigned to the
Warsaw Pact. In turn, these forces could be deployed in
accordance with Soviet military strategy against an NSWP country
or NATO.
Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance was
scarcely veiled. The Warsaw Pact's armed forces had 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 Warsaw Pact's armed forces could be transferred in wartime
to the Soviet General Staff and to Soviet field commanders. The
dual roles of the Warsaw Pact commander in chief, who was a first
deputy Soviet minister of defense, and the Warsaw Pact chief of
staff, who was a first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff,
facilitated the transfer of Warsaw Pact forces to Soviet control.
The subordination of the Warsaw Pact to the Soviet General Staff
was also shown clearly in the Soviet military hierarchy. In the
Soviet order of precedence, the chief of the Soviet General Staff
was listed above the Warsaw Pact commander in chief even though
both positions also were designated first deputy 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 that the Soviet Union dominated 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.
Headed by the Warsaw Pact's commander in chief, the Joint
Command was divided into distinct Soviet and East European tiers.
The deputy commanders in chief included Soviet and East European
officers. The Soviet officers serving as deputy commanders in
chief were specifically responsible for coordinating the East
European navies and air forces with the corresponding Soviet
service branches. The East European deputy commanders in chief
were the deputy ministers of defense of the NSWP countries. While
providing formal NSWP representation in the Joint Command, the
East European deputies also assisted in the coordination of
Soviet and non-Soviet forces. The commander in chief, deputy
commanders in chief, and chief of staff of the Warsaw Pact's
armed forces gathered 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 rotated among the capitals of
the Warsaw Pact countries.
The Joint Staff was the only standing Warsaw Pact military
body and the official executive organ of the CMD, commander in
chief, and Military Council. As such, it performed the bulk of
the Warsaw Pact's work in the military realm. Like the Joint
Command, the Joint Staff had both Soviet and East European
officers. The non-Soviet officers also served as the principal
link between the Soviet and East European armed forces. The Joint
Staff organized all joint exercises and arranged multilateral
meetings and contacts of Warsaw Pact military personnel at all
levels.
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. After 1969 the Soviet Union insisted
on tighter Warsaw Pact military integration as the price for
greater NSWP participation in alliance decision making.
Soviet Military Strategy and the Warsaw Pact
The Soviet armed forces constituted the bulk of the Warsaw
Pact's military manpower. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union provided
73 of the 126 Warsaw Pact tank and motorized rifle divisions.
Located in the groups of Soviet forces and four westernmost
military districts of the Soviet Union, these divisions comprised
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 was only a Soviet mechanism for
organizing intra-alliance interventions or maintaining control of
Eastern Europe and did not significantly augment Soviet offensive
power vis-ŕ-vis NATO. Essentially a peacetime structure for NSWP
training and mobilization, the Warsaw Pact had no independent
role in wartime nor a military strategy distinct from Soviet
military strategy. The individual NSWP armies, however, played
important roles in the Soviet strategy for war outside the formal
context of the Warsaw Pact.
The goal of Soviet military strategy in Europe was a quick
victory over NATO in a nonnuclear war. Soviet miliary strategists
planned 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. In this plan, the
Warsaw Pact countries would provide forward bases, staging areas,
and interior lines of communication for the Soviet Union against
NATO. A quick victory would be needed to 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 the West's 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 have conceivably captured its objective, the economic
potential of Western Europe, relatively intact. This 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 offensive operation concept that Soviet military
theoreticians first proposed in the 1930s.
Continuing Soviet concern over the combat reliability of its
East European allies influenced, to a great extent, the
deployment of NSWP forces under the Soviet military strategy.
Soviet leaders believed that the Warsaw Pact allies would be most
likely to remain loyal if the Soviet armed forces engaged in a
short, successful offensive operation against NATO while
deploying NSWP forces defensively. Soviet concern over the
reliability of its Warsaw Pact allies was reflected in the
alliance's military-technical policy, which was under Soviet
control. The Soviet Union gave the East European allies less
modern, though still effective, weapons and equipment to keep
their armies less capable than the Soviet armed forces. Thus the
Soviet Union could keep the East European armies somewhat
modernized while not substantially increasing their capability to
resist Soviet intervention.
The Weakening of the Alliance's Cohesion, 1970-85
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 Soviet Union could no
longer use the alliance to transmit its positions to, and receive
automatic endorsements 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 movement 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 NATO and the
Warsaw Pact and concentrated instead on legitimating the
territorial status quo in Europe. The Soviet Union 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
postwar borders in Eastern Europe and tacitly recognized Soviet
control of the eastern portion of both Germany and Europe. The
Soviet Union claimed the 1975 Helsinki Accords (see Glossary),
which ratified the existing political division of Europe, as a
major victory for Soviet diplomacy and the realization of long-
standing 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 Soviet Union 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. Joint
Warsaw Pact exercises conducted in the 1970s gave the Soviet
allies their first real capability for offensive operations other
than policing actions within the alliance. The East European
countries also began to take an active part in Soviet strategy 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. It employed its Warsaw Pact allies
as surrogates primarily because their activities minimized the
need for direct Soviet involvement and obviated possible
international criticism of Soviet actions in the Third World.
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.
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. During this period, the Soviet Union
also relied on its East European allies to provide the bulk of
the economic aid and credits given by the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe to the countries of the Third World. Beginning in
the late 1970s, mounting economic problems sharply curtailed the
contribution of the East European allies to the Soviet Union's
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 rise of the independent trade union movement Solidarity
shook the foundation of communist party rule in Poland and,
consequently, Soviet control of a country the Soviet Union
considered 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 it did 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 Belorussian Military District
as a potential invasion force (see fig. 30). Faced with the
threat of Soviet military intervention, the Polish government
instituted martial law and suppressed Solidarity. 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.
Although the Polish People's 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 principal junior partner of the Soviet Union.
The End of Détente
In the late 1970s, 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 tension 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. 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 the threat
that they perceived emanated from NATO. Discussions of the "NATO
threat" also played a large part in Warsaw Pact debates about an
appropriate level of NSWP military expenditure. 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. The refusal of the NSWP countries to meet their
Warsaw Pact financial obligations in the 1980s further indicated
diminished alliance cohesion.
The Renewal of the Alliance, 1985-89
After becoming general secretary of the CPSU 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. Few people doubted that the Warsaw Pact member states would
renew the alliance. Some Western analysts speculated, however,
that the Soviet Union might unilaterally dismantle its formal
alliance structure to improve the Soviet image and to put
pressure on the West to disband NATO. The Soviet Union 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 assured the Soviet Union that the
essence of its 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 not fully
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. Although the Soviet and East European
leaders debated the terms of the Warsaw Pact's renewal at their
April 1985 meeting, they did not change the original 1955 treaty,
nor the alliance's structure, in any way.
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 Party Congress 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. He demonstrated a greater sensitivity to East
European concerns than previous Soviet leaders by briefing the
NSWP leaders in their own capitals after the 1985 Geneva and 1986
Reykjavik superpower summit meetings. In 1987 the Warsaw Pact,
under Soviet tutelage, adopted a defense-oriented military
doctrine. And, following Gorbachev's announced unilateral
reduction in the Soviet armed forces, the NSWP countries also
announced unilateral military reduction during 1988 and 1989. In
the late 1980s, however, mounting economic difficulties and the
advanced age of trusted, long-time communist party leaders, like
Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia, Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria, and
János Kádár in Hungary, intensified the danger of domestic
turmoil and internal power struggles in the NSWP countries and
threatened the alliance's cohesion.
* * *
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 those of 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 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 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 perennial 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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