Warsaw Pact

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The Warsaw Pact or Warsaw Treaty Organization, officially named the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (Russian: Договор о дружбе, сотрудничестве и взаимной помощи Translit.: Dogovor o druzhbe, sotrudnichestve i vzaimnoy pomoshchi), was a military alliance of socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe. It was established on 14 May, 1955 in Warsaw, Poland. The pact served to counter the potential threat from the NATO alliance and also to retaliate against the integration of a "re-militarized" West Germany into NATO on 9 May, 1955 via ratification of the Paris Peace Treaties. The treaty was signed in Warsaw on May 14, 1955 and official copies were made in Russian, Polish, Czech and German. This treaty was modeled on the NATO treaty, in that there was a political Consultative Committee, followed by a civilian secretary general, while down the chain of command there was a military commander in chief and a combined staff, although the similarities between the two international organizations ended there. ^[1]

[edit] Members

• Albania
• People's Republic of Bulgaria
• Czechoslovakia
• German Democratic Republic
• People's Republic of Hungary
• People's Republic of Poland
• Socialist Republic of Romania
• Soviet Union

All the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe except for Yugoslavia were members. Members of the Warsaw Pact pledged to defend each other if one or more of the members were attacked. The treaty also stated that relations among the signatories were based on mutual noninterference in internal affairs and respect for national sovereignty and independence. The noninterference rule would later be de facto violated with the Soviet interventions in Hungary (Hungarian Revolution, 1956) and Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring, 1968). In both cases Soviets claimed to have been invited, and thus the rules were not considered formally violated (see relevant articles for details).

On 24 September 1990, East Germany signed a treaty with the Soviet Union ending East Germany's membership in the Warsaw Pact and on 3 October 1990, reunited with West Germany.

[edit] Structure

The Warsaw Pact was divided into two branches: the Political Consultative Committee, which coordinated all non-military activities, and the Unified Command of Pact Armed Forces, which had authority over the troops assigned to it by member states and was headed by the Supreme Commander, who at the same time was the First Deputy Minister of Defence of the USSR. The head of the Warsaw Pact Unified Staff was the First Deputy Head of General Staff of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR.^[2] The Warsaw Pact's headquarters were in Moscow. Despite the fact there were two branches in charge of the armed forces they still reported to the party. No military action could be carried out without the party's approval.^[3]

[edit] Supreme Commanders

[edit] Heads of Unified Staff

[edit] History

Authors and people alike did not believe that the Iron Curtain would ever fall. Here Malcolm Mackintosh is quoted as saying: “The Soviet Union will never give up its political and military control over Eastern Europe; the buffer zone is here to stay.” ^[4]

The Soviet Union claimed that the May 1955 creation of the Warsaw Pact was done in reaction to the induction of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO in that same year. This claim's validity is weakened by the fact that at the time some senior members of all non-Soviet signatory governments were Russian military officers. The pact formalized the Soviet Union's position as head of a socialist bloc of states, and replaced bilateral relations with a multilateral framework.[1]

During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the government, led by Prime Minister Imre Nagy, announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In response, Soviet troops entered Hungary, and crushed the uprising in two weeks, using the Warsaw Pact as a justification. Tanks were sent in from Romania, apart from this no other Warsaw Pact country took part in the invasion.

Warsaw Pact forces were utilized at times, such as during the 1968 Prague Spring when they invaded Czechoslovakia to overthrow the reform movement that was being led by Alexander Dubček's government. Lieutenant General Václav Prchlík had already denounced the Warsaw Pact in a televised news conference as an unequal alliance and declared that the Czechoslovak Army was prepared to defend the country's sovereignty by force, if necessary. On August 20, 1968, a force consisting of 23 Soviet Army divisions entered Czechoslovakia. Taking part in the invasion were also one Hungarian and two Polish divisions along with one Bulgarian brigade. Romania refused to contribute troops. Two divisions of the East German National People's Army were stationed at the border with Czechoslovakia but did not participate directly in the invasion, owing to memories of Hitler's 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland and later the subjugation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The East Germans, however, provided logistical support to the invasion and some East German forces, such as liaison officers, signal troops and officers of the Ministry of State Security participated directly in the invasion.

This intervention was explained by the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated "When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." Implicit in this doctrine was that the leadership of the Soviet Union reserved to itself the right to define "socialism" and "capitalism". Thus, "socialism" was defined according to the Soviet model, and anything significantly different from this model was considered to be a step towards capitalism.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Albania protested by formally leaving the Warsaw Pact, although it had stopped supporting the Pact as early as 1961. The Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu denounced the invasion as a violation of both international law and of the Warsaw Pact's principle of mutual non-interference in internal affairs, saying that collective self-defense against external aggression was the only valid mission of the Warsaw Pact.

In 1981 a large-scale exercise was conducted by Warsaw Pact forces at the time of Solidarity crisis in Soviet controlled Poland. There is a debate regarding the possibility that the exercise was a preparation for Soviet invasion against Poland, aimed at crushing the Polish pro-independence movement[2].

NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries never engaged each other in armed conflict, but fought the Cold War for more than 35 years often through 'proxy wars'. In December 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, proposed the so-called Sinatra Doctrine which stated that the Brezhnev Doctrine would be abandoned and that the Soviet Union's European allies could do as they wished. Soon thereafter, a series of political changes swept across Central and Eastern Europe, leading to the end of European Communist states.

There are many examples of soldiers of the Warsaw Pact serving alongside NATO soldiers on operational deployments under the auspices of the United Nations, for example Canadian and Polish soldiers both served on the UNEFME (United Nations Emergency Force, Middle East - also known as UNEF II) mission, and Polish and Canadian troops also served together in Vietnam on the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS).

One historical curiosity is that after German reunification in October 1990, the new united Germany was a member of NATO (East Germany's Warsaw Pact membership ended with reunification), but still had Soviet (later Russian) troops stationed in its eastern territory until mid-1994.

After 1989, the newly independent governments in Central and Eastern Europe were not interested in remaining within a structure that allowed the Soviets to safeguard Communist control in their countries, and in January 1991 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland announced that they would withdraw all support by 1 July 1991. Bulgaria followed suit in February 1991, and it became clear that the Pact was effectively dead. The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague on 1 July 1991. Vaclav Havel (the former President of Czechoslovakia), counts the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as his greatest accomplishment, according to his recent memoir To The Castle and Back. (See also Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe)

[edit] Post-Warsaw Pact

On 12 March 1999, the former Warsaw Pact members and successor states Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004.

In November 2005 Poland decided to make its military archives regarding the Warsaw Pact publicly available through the Institute of National Remembrance. About 1,300 documents were declassified in January 2006 with the remaining approximately 100 documents being evaluated for future declassification by a historical commission. Finally, 30 were released, with 70 remaining classified as they involved issues with the current strategic situation of the Polish military. It was revealed in declassified documents that, until the 1980s, the Warsaw Pact's military plans in the case of war with the West consisted of a swift land offensive whose objective would have been to secure Western Europe quickly (using nuclear weapons if necessary). Poland itself was home to 178 nuclear missiles, growing to 250 in the late eighties. Warsaw Pact commanders made very few plans for the possibility of fighting a defensive war on their own territory.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Collective Security Treaty Organization (treaty between 6 post Soviet states)

[edit] References

This article contains material from the Library of Congress Country Studies, which are United States government publications in the public domain.

• The Warsaw Pact
• Modern History Sourcebook: The Warsaw Pact
• Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact

[edit] Further reading

• Mastny, Vojtech and Malcolm Byrne (eds.). A Cardboard Castle: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005. 726 pp.
• Umbach, Frank. Das rote Bündnis: Entwicklung und Zerfall des Warschauer Pakts, 1955-1991. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2005. 701 pp. (German)
• The Warsaw Pact: Arms, Doctrine and Strategy, Lewis, William J.; Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis; 1982. ISBN 0-07-031746-1. This book presents an overview of all the Warsaw Pact armed forces as well as a section on Soviet strategy, a model land campaign which the Soviet Union could have conducted against NATO, a section on vehicles, weapons and aircraft, and a full-color section on the uniforms, nations badges and rank-insignia of all the nations of the Warsaw Pact.
• Havel, Václav To the Castle and Back New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007.

[edit] External links

• Documents of the Warsaw Pact archives, Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP)

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