Warsaw Pact Was Signed 60 Years Ago

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This coming May 14th will mark the 60th anniversary of an event few people today know or care about. On that day in 1955, the Warsaw Pact was signed between the Soviet Union and its east European Communist satellites of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

The Cold War between the western democracies and the Communist world had already been raging for almost a decade, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in place since April 4, 1949.

But the proximate cause for the signing in Warsaw of the “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance” was the decision by the western powers five days earlier to allow West Germany, the part of the country occupied by Britain, France and the United States in 1945, to join NATO and re-arm. It had just been granted full sovereignty.

The decision to admit West Germany made its neighbours to the east wary. After all, it had been only a decade since Nazi Germany had devastated the region, resulting in tens of millions killed. The Soviet Union itself had suffered at least 25 million dead. In Poland, an estimated one-quarter of its population had perished.

With the formation of the Warsaw Pact, Europe was split into ideological and military camps. The Pact – always run by Russians -- allowed the USSR to intervene in any of its member states and legitimized, at least from Moscow’s point of view, Soviet control over the countries it had occupied after 1945.

It provided cover for the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising in the autumn of 1956, after the government of Imre Nagy formally declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

The policy was made even more explicit by the Brezhnev Doctrine, named for Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who used it to invade Czechoslovakia and overthrow the Communists who were trying to reform its political system in August 1968.

“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,” he declared. Along with Soviet troops, the armies of Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland snuffed out the Prague Spring.

Soon afterwards, Albania, which had sided with China in its ideological dispute with the Soviet Union, left the Pact. Romania had increasingly distanced itself from the Pact and Moscow’s leadership by the mid-1960s. Neither country participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Yugoslavia, though a Communist state, had refused to acknowledge Soviet supremacy. It had broken with Moscow in 1948 and was never a member.

By the late 1980s, the Soviet empire was crumbling, and it would take the Warsaw Pact down with it. Mikhail Gorbachev became the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, and soon made it clear he would not use the provisions of the Pact to hold onto eastern Europe by force.

It didn’t take long for its members to free themselves of Soviet domination. In October 1990 Germany was reunited, and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland withdrew from all Warsaw Pact military exercises.

A few months later, this once-powerful military alliance was no more. The defence and foreign ministers of its members met in Hungary in February 1991to disband the Pact, and it ceased to exist on July 1, 1991. Today all of them, as well as the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, are part of NATO.