Warsaw Pact
The Soviet-led military alliance of Eastern Europe from 1955 to 1991, used less to fight NATO than to keep its own members in line.
The Warsaw Pact was the Soviet Union's military alliance for its half of a divided Europe, and across the thirty-six years of its existence it never once fired a shot at NATO. Founded on May 14, 1955, it was the Eastern bloc's answer to a specific provocation: days earlier, West Germany had joined NATO and begun to rearm, barely a decade after German armies had devastated the Soviet Union. Moscow's response was to formalize what already existed in practice, a ring of Eastern European states bound to the Soviet military.
Eight members, one master
The treaty was signed in Warsaw by eight countries: the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. On paper it mirrored NATO, a mutual-defense pact in which an attack on one was an attack on all. In reality the alliance was profoundly unequal. Soviet officers held the top commands, Soviet doctrine set the plans, and Soviet troops sat on member soil. Albania drifted away after breaking with Moscow, ceasing to take part in 1961 and formally withdrawing in 1968. What bound the rest was less shared interest than Soviet power.
A tool aimed inward
The clearest proof of the Pact's real purpose is where its forces actually fought: not against the West, but against its own members. Twice, Eastern Europeans tried to loosen the Soviet grip, and twice the alliance crushed them. In 1956, when Hungary's reformist government declared it would leave the Pact and turn neutral, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, killing thousands and installing a compliant regime. In August 1968, when Czechoslovakia's leaders launched the liberalizing reforms of the 'Prague Spring,' Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies invaded to shut it down.
Out of that second invasion came a doctrine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev declared that socialist states held only 'limited sovereignty,' and that the bloc could intervene wherever socialism was threatened. The Brezhnev Doctrine was, in effect, an official statement of what the Pact had always been for: keeping members in the fold, by force if necessary.
The doctrine reversed
The alliance held as long as Moscow was willing to enforce it. The turning point came when a Soviet leader decided he no longer would. In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev quietly abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine, signaling that the Soviet Army would not intervene to prop up unpopular communist governments. The effect was immediate. Once Eastern Europeans understood the tanks would not come, the regimes fell one after another in the revolutions of 1989, from Poland to East Germany to Czechoslovakia, mostly without Soviet resistance.
An alliance whose cohesion had rested on coercion could not survive the removal of the coercion. The Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved on July 1, 1991, at a final meeting in Prague, the same city its tanks had occupied twenty-three years earlier. The Soviet Union itself vanished five months later.
The eastward march
The Pact's disappearance did not leave a neutral space. Within a decade, the very countries it had once bound to Moscow began joining the alliance it had been built to oppose. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic entered NATO in 1999; Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic states followed in 2004. For former satellites, NATO membership was insurance against a return of the domination the Warsaw Pact had embodied. For Moscow, that same expansion looked like encirclement, a grievance Russian leaders cite to this day. The Pact is gone, but the argument over the ground it once held is not.