Warsaw Pact

• 1. Introduction

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  The Warsaw Pact was born on the 14th of May 1955, eight days after West Germany joined NATO. Its founding declaration accused a remilitarized Western Germany of increasing "the danger of another war" and posing a threat to "the national security of the peaceable states." Eight countries signed that day in Warsaw, Poland, creating an alliance that would define European security for the next 36 years.

  But the pact's origins lie not in Soviet ambition alone, and not in any desire to build an empire. They lie in a long series of rejected offers, a unified Germany that never came to be, and a fear of German military power that was still viscerally alive on both sides of the Iron Curtain. How did a military alliance of eight nations end up turning its weapons on its own members? Why did Romania manage to become, in effect, an independent country while nominally staying inside? And what did a roadside picnic in August 1989 have to do with the whole structure falling apart? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Rejected Offers

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  Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sat across the table at the Berlin Conference of January-February 1954, and made a series of proposals that Western foreign ministers Dulles, Eden, and Bidault refused one by one. He proposed a reunified, neutral Germany. He proposed a General European Treaty on Collective Security open to all European states regardless of their political systems. He even proposed that the USSR join NATO itself.

  British General Hastings Ismay, a fierce supporter of NATO expansion, framed the Soviet request to join NATO in blunt terms: it was, he said, like "an unrepentant burglar requesting to join the police force." The US, UK, and France rejected every proposal. Historian Rolf Steininger identified West German Chancellor Adenauer's conviction that neutralization meant Soviet-style influence as the pivotal factor in blocking a unified Germany. Adenauer also calculated that unification might have ended his party's dominant role in the West German parliament.

  On the 20th of March 1952, an earlier attempt, sparked by the so-called Stalin Note, had also collapsed. Western powers insisted that a unified Germany be free to join the European Defence Community and rearm. James Dunn of the United States, meeting in Paris with Eden, Adenauer, and Robert Schuman, stated plainly that "the object should be to avoid discussion with the Russians and to press on the European Defense Community."

  France then knocked out that very Defence Community. On the 30th of August 1954, the French Parliament voted it down. The US State Department began looking for other routes to German rearmament, including strategies to bypass a future French veto. On the 23rd of October 1954, the decision was taken: West Germany would join NATO. Its formal admission came on the 9th of May 1955. Halvard Lange, Norway's Foreign Affairs Minister, called that moment "a decisive turning point in the history of our continent."

• 3. A Cardboard Castle

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  NATO officials had a name for the Warsaw Pact from the moment it appeared: a "cardboard castle." That verdict rested on a simple observation. By 1955, the Soviet Union already held armed forces and political dominance across every one of its Eastern European satellite states. The pact added no new military reach. Its critics inside and outside the Eastern Bloc described it as "superfluous" from the day it was signed.

  The pact's structure confirmed Soviet dominance at every level. Every Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces had to be a senior officer of the Soviet Union, simultaneously serving as First Deputy Minister of Defence of the USSR. The Chief of the Combined Staff held a parallel dual role as First Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff. No rotation, no consensus, no fixed terms. This stood in direct contrast to NATO, where the Secretary General and the Chair of the Military Committee rotated among member nations through unanimous agreement.

  Historian Mark Kramer calculated that the net outflow of resources from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union reached roughly $15 billion to $20 billion in the first decade after World War II, a sum approximately equal to the total American Marshall Plan aid sent to Western Europe. The USSR extracted that wealth through seized industrial plants, war reparations, and trading arrangements deliberately structured to benefit Moscow at the expense of the satellite states.

  Despite the pact's nominal pledge that signatories would respect each other's sovereignty and not intervene in each other's internal affairs, its actual military record told a different story. When the Imre Nagy government declared Hungary's withdrawal from the pact in 1956, Soviet troops entered the country and crushed the revolt, killing an estimated 2,500 Hungarian citizens. The pact's stated purpose was collective defense against outsiders. Its sole two military actions targeted members of its own alliance.

• 4. Romania Goes Its Own Way

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  On the 22nd of April 1964, the Romanian Communist Party issued a declaration that read, in part: "Every Marxist-Leninist Party has a sovereign right to elaborate, choose or change the forms and methods of socialist construction" and "There exists no 'parent' party and 'offspring' party, no 'superior' and 'subordinated' parties, but only the large family of communist and workers' parties having equal rights." It was, in effect, a declaration of political independence from Moscow, written in the language of communist theory.

  Romania had been moving toward that moment for years. In 1958, Romania requested and obtained the complete withdrawal of the Soviet Army from its territory. By July 1963, Romania had blocked Mongolia's accession to the Warsaw Pact, the first time a non-Soviet member had stopped a Soviet initiative outright. In November 1963, Romania voted at the United Nations in favor of establishing a nuclear-free zone in Latin America, while every other Soviet-aligned state abstained. In December 1964, all Soviet advisors were withdrawn from Romania, including those embedded in intelligence and security services. Romania set up what the source describes as "departments specialized in anti-KGB counterespionage."

  When Andrei Grechko assumed command of the Warsaw Pact, he launched programs specifically designed to prevent Romanian doctrinal independence from spreading to other member states. Romania's doctrine of territorial defense was seen as a threat to the pact's coherence. The country's tank forces drew on locally developed models rather than Soviet equipment. After 1964, the Soviet Army was barred from conducting exercises on Romanian soil.

  Nicole Ceaușescu, for his own political reasons, chose to remain inside the pact's formal structure. His interest in staying was partly about selling himself at home as a nationalist leader under the shadow of a potential Soviet invasion, and partly about maintaining a seat at European forums he could not otherwise access. Romania and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact bloc, for instance, formed two distinct delegating groups in drafting the Helsinki Final Act. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, at the start of 1990, implicitly confirmed how little leverage Moscow had over Bucharest: he said he needed to visit Romania in person to figure out how to "restore Soviet influence."

• 5. Invasion of Czechoslovakia

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  In August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces crossed into Czechoslovakia. All member countries participated except Romania and Albania. The German Democratic Republic provided only minimal support. Albania, which had already withheld cooperation since 1961 over the Albanian-Soviet split, formally withdrew from the pact less than one month after the invasion.

  The Brezhnev Doctrine, articulated in the aftermath of that operation, stated explicitly that military intervention was justified if a country appeared to be violating core socialist principles, meaning breaking away from Soviet influence. The doctrine gave ideological form to what the pact had already demonstrated twice in practice.

  Planning documents that became available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union revealed the scale of what Soviet and Warsaw Pact commanders had been preparing for throughout the Cold War. A 1964 Czech planning exercise had envisaged seizing the French city of Lyon by the ninth day of an advance westward. The 1979 exercise known as Seven Days to the River Rhine, a command post exercise without field activity, laid out a short, swift invasion and capture of Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands east of the Rhine. The exercise assumed nuclear weapons would be used in response to a NATO first strike.

  The Warsaw Treaty's own nuclear war plan, Seven Days to the River Rhine, was among the documents the Polish government released to the Institute of National Remembrance in November 2005. The Institute published roughly 1,300 declassified documents in January 2006. The Polish government withheld 100 documents for further military review; 30 of those were eventually published, while 70 remained secret.

• 6. The Picnic That Ended an Alliance

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  The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 along the border between Hungary and Austria. The event traced back to an idea by Otto von Habsburg. For a brief window, a gate in the Iron Curtain opened. East German citizens crossed in large numbers. The source describes it as "the beginning of the end of the Warsaw Pact, regardless of military power."

  The spread of that image through media reached populations across Eastern Europe. Solidarity's electoral success in Poland in June 1989 had already established that a communist government could be peacefully voted out of power. By the time Lech Walesa's Solidarity government took office, it assured the Soviets that Poland would remain in the pact. But the guarantee no longer carried the weight it once would have. The ideological and institutional structures that had held the Eastern Bloc together were visibly weakening.

  Perestroika and glasnost had opened space for independent national politics that previously could not exist. Governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union all fell between 1989 and 1991. As those final chapters of the Cold War played out, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary each contributed to the US-led coalition that liberated Kuwait in the Gulf War, fighting alongside NATO members they had spent decades preparing to fight against.

  East Germany left the pact when German reunification took effect in 1990. On the 25th of February 1991, at a meeting in Hungary, the defense and foreign ministers of the six remaining member states declared the pact dissolved by joint declaration. On the 1st of July 1991, in Prague, Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel formally ended the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance after 36 years. The USSR itself ceased to exist in December 1991.

  Within the following two decades, every Warsaw Pact country outside the former Soviet Union joined NATO. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were admitted on the 12th of March 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia followed in March 2004. Croatia and Albania joined on the 1st of April 2009.