The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–1969

The Soviet Union established the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or Warsaw Pact) in May 1955 as an ostensible counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) founded by the United States, Canada, and ten West European countries in April 1949. An empty vessel or “cardboard castle” through the 1950s, the Warsaw Pact developed an institutional structure of councils, committees, and advisory bodies in the 1960s. This bureaucratic edifice was both consequence and facilitator of efforts by the smaller states in the Soviet bloc—Albania (initially), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—to use the alliance structure to pursue autonomous foreign and security policy agendas. The seven non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) states, as they came to be known, were ruled by Communist regimes imposed by Soviet occupation, subversion, and pressure (Albania was a partial exception) and, as demonstrated in 1989, remained existentially dependent on Soviet influence and ultimately Soviet military force for...