Warsaw Pact (1955): The Soviet Bloc's Military Alliance

The Warsaw Pact was the military alliance of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, founded when eight communist states signed the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance in Warsaw on 14 May 1955. Created as the Eastern answer to NATO, it bound the members to defend one another, placed their armies under a Soviet-led command and lasted until 1991. For more than three decades it was one of the two armed blocs that divided Europe during the Cold War.

Background: two Germanies and two blocs

After the Second World War the Soviet Union already dominated Eastern Europe through occupation forces, local communist parties and a web of bilateral treaties. The Western powers formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 (see founding of NATO), but for several years Moscow did not need a formal counterpart: its control over its neighbours rested on direct political power.

The question that changed this was Germany. The Paris Agreements of October 1954 ended the Allied occupation of West Germany, allowed it to rearm and invited it into NATO. The Soviet Union campaigned hard against the plan and warned that it would respond. The agreements came into force on 5 May 1955, and the Federal Republic of Germany formally joined NATO on 9 May. Two days later, on 11 May, the Eastern states met in Warsaw.

A second, less visible motive came from Austria. The Austrian State Treaty, signed in Vienna on 15 May 1955, the day after the Warsaw meeting, ended the four-power occupation of Austria. Soviet troops in Hungary and Romania had been stationed there partly to guard communication lines to the Soviet zone of Austria, so a new legal basis for their presence was useful. Historians also note that Nikita Khrushchev hoped the new alliance would serve as a bargaining chip: the treaty stated that it would lapse if a general European collective security system were created.

The signing in Warsaw

Delegations met in the Palace of the Council of Ministers in Warsaw, today the Presidential Palace, from 11 to 14 May 1955. The treaty was signed on 14 May by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the German Democratic Republic. Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin led the Soviet delegation, and the Polish prime minister, Józef Cyrankiewicz, hosted the conference. The People’s Republic of China attended as an observer but did not join.

The treaty was short. Its key clause, Article 4, promised immediate assistance, “including the use of armed force”, to any member attacked in Europe. Members pledged to consult on international questions, to refrain from joining rival alliances and to respect one another’s sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, a promise that later events would empty of meaning. The treaty was to run for 20 years, with an automatic ten-year extension for members that did not give notice.

Command structure

Two bodies were created on paper. The Political Consultative Committee brought together party leaders and heads of government and was supposed to coordinate foreign and defence policy. The Joint Command, based in Moscow, was to direct the armed forces assigned to the alliance. Its Supreme Commander was always Soviet; the first was Marshal Ivan Konev, the Second World War commander, and its chief of staff was also a Soviet officer.

In practice the alliance worked largely as an extension of the Soviet General Staff. Soviet equipment, doctrine and training dominated, and Soviet forces were stationed in East Germany, Poland and Hungary (and, from 1968, Czechoslovakia). East Germany’s National People’s Army, created in January 1956, was integrated into the alliance’s forces in 1956. Reforms agreed in Budapest in 1969 added a Committee of Defence Ministers and other joint bodies, giving the allies more formal voice, though not real control.

From the early 1960s the alliance held regular large-scale joint exercises, and its war plans assumed a rapid offensive westward if war broke out with NATO. Documents opened after 1990, such as the Polish exercise plan “Seven Days to the River Rhine” of 1979, showed that these plans expected nuclear weapons to be used on both sides from the start. Throughout the Cold War, Western estimates credited the pact with a clear advantage in tanks, artillery and troop numbers in central Europe, while NATO relied more heavily on nuclear deterrence and technology.

Crises inside the alliance

The Warsaw Pact never fought the West. Its use of force was directed at its own members. In October 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, the government of Imre Nagy declared Hungary neutral and announced its withdrawal from the pact on 1 November. Soviet troops crushed the uprising three days later, a Soviet operation rather than a joint one, but it showed that leaving was not an option.

In August 1968 forces of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia to end the reforms of the Prague Spring; East Germany helped prepare the operation, but its troops largely stayed at the border. Moscow justified the invasion with what Western commentators called the Brezhnev Doctrine: the idea that socialist states had a duty to intervene when socialism was threatened in a fellow member.

Not every member followed the line. Albania, which sided with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute, stopped attending meetings in the early 1960s and formally withdrew in September 1968 in protest at the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu refused to take part in that invasion, limited joint manoeuvres on its soil and pursued its own foreign policy, while remaining a member.

Key people

• Nikolai Bulganin (1895–1975), Soviet Premier, who signed for the USSR.
• Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the leading political force behind the alliance.
• Marshal Ivan Konev (1897–1973), first Supreme Commander of the Joint Armed Forces.
• Józef Cyrankiewicz (1911–1989), Polish prime minister and host of the Warsaw conference.

The end of the Warsaw Pact

The treaty was renewed for another 20 years in April 1985, just after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Within five years the political order it protected had collapsed. The revolutions of 1989 brought non-communist governments to power across Eastern Europe, and German reunification in October 1990 removed East Germany from the alliance.

At a meeting in Budapest on 25 February 1991, the members agreed to dismantle the military structures with effect from 31 March 1991. On 1 July 1991, in Prague, they signed a protocol formally dissolving the alliance. Soviet troops were withdrawn from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1991 and from Poland and the former East Germany by 1993 and 1994. Many former members later joined NATO: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, and Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia in 2004.

Timeline

• 1954, 23 October: The Paris Agreements open the way for West German rearmament and NATO membership.
• 1955, 9 May: West Germany joins NATO.
• 1955, 14 May: The Warsaw Treaty is signed by eight communist states.
• 1956, 1 November: Hungary announces its withdrawal; Soviet forces crush the revolution on 4 November.
• 1968, 20–21 August: Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia.
• 1968, September: Albania formally leaves the pact.
• 1985, 26 April: The treaty is extended for 20 years.
• 1991, 1 July: The Warsaw Pact is formally dissolved in Prague.

Why it matters

The Warsaw Pact turned the division of Europe into a standing military confrontation, with two armed blocs facing each other along the inner-German border for more than 30 years. Yet its record shows that its main function was political: it held the Soviet bloc together, and its only major operations were against its own members. When Moscow stopped enforcing that unity in 1989, the alliance dissolved within two years.