Warsaw Pact (or Warsaw Treaty Organization) (1955-91), military alliance comprising eight states—Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the USSR—led by the USSR and throughout its 35-year history the principal opponent of and military threat to NATO.
Following the occupation of central Europe at the end of WW II, the USSR set up tame national armed forces in the countries it had occupied. Those of Poland were commanded, initially, by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Soviet marshal of Polish stock. Although some national characteristics were retained—and later became more pronounced—the armed forces of the states in Soviet-occupied zones were equipped and organized entirely on Soviet lines, were under Soviet command, and had Soviet occupation troops alongside them. In western Europe, the countries liberated at the end of the war retained their own armed forces, but these joined together voluntarily in 1949 as the NATO Alliance. At the Paris Conference in 1954, the Western European Union (WEU) was formed as a European pillar of NATO, and West Germany was invited to join, which it did the following year.
Partly in response to German accession to NATO, eight of the east European socialist countries met in Warsaw on 11 May. Yugoslavia did not attend and never joined. The Pact was signed on 14 May and came into effect on 5 June. Although nominally an alliance between sovereign states, the Warsaw Pact was quite different from NATO. The latter was, and remains, a voluntary alliance which requires consensus to act, although the USA is unquestionably the dominant power. The Warsaw Pact was run by the USSR and used as a cordon sanitaire. Its working language was Russian and the first C-in-C of Warsaw Pact armed forces, appointed in 1956, was the Soviet Koniev.
The Warsaw Treaty stressed the maintenance of international peace and security (Article 1). It proposed effective arms control measures (Article 2), and obliged member states to consult each other on all aspects of international relations (Article 3). Other alliances prejudicial to the interests of the Warsaw Pact were banned (Article 7). In the event of attack on any Warsaw Pact states they would have the right to individual or collective defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter (Article 4). This clause was cited to justify the invasion of Hungary in 1957 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In effect, this was the same as NATO's ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Like NATO, the Warsaw Pact was declaredly a defensive alliance. NATO never believed this, but it was NATO which expanded after the Pact dissolved, and which first attacked a sovereign state outside its own borders in 1999.
The Pact's military organization comprised the committee of defence ministers (KMO), the combined armed forces (OVS) and the combined command (OK). In addition to the combined command, there was a military committee of the combined armed forces, a combined armed forces headquarters—in Moscow—and a technical committee (TK). Commonality of equipment—all Soviet-designed, although some was later adapted and improved by the ‘Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact’ (NSWP) states—and of training and organization would probably have given the Warsaw Pact the advantage on the battlefield. By the 1980s the NSWP states were increasingly acquiring their own style and equipment. The Poles played a leading role in developing the idea of the operational manoeuvre group, while the Czechoslovaks built their own multiple rocket launchers and self-propelled (SP) guns. Following the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the unification of Germany, the Warsaw Pact was defunct—East Germany had been a member. In 1990 it was announced that it would be dissolved and the USSR ratified the decision at the end of 1991.
— Christopher Bellamy





