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Subject essay: James von Geldern

On February 25, 1991, the foreign and defense ministers of the Warsaw Treaty Organization convened to dissolve the alliance. That so momentous an event passed with relatively little comment was a measure of how thoroughly the preceding two years had drained it of meaning. Founded in May 1955, ostensibly in response to the admission of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO, the pact originally united the USSR, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania (Albania withdrew in 1968). Over the following decades, the Warsaw Pact amassed formidable offensive and defensive capabilities, embodied most powerfully in its massive tank and artillery formations. Arrayed north to south along the imaginary line of the Iron Curtain, Warsaw Pact troops faced their NATO counterparts across the ugly scar that divided Germany into East and West. Yet in a bitter irony, the only invasions the pact ever launched were directed against its own members — Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The alliance crumbled for reasons both structural and ideological. Having long served as a military prop for the unpopular Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, and enjoying little to no popular support in those countries, the treaty framework became increasingly obsolete once non-Communist governments came to power. Soviet authorities showed some tenacity in insisting on the pact's continuation, but it was plain that the deepest hostilities animating the organization had always been internal; the countries of Eastern Europe feared attack from the Soviet Union above all. Eventually even the Soviet leadership abandoned the alliance, driven by the mounting economic toll of military expenditures that a tottering economy could no longer sustain. A new brand of strategic thinking, pioneered by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, reached the sobering conclusion that Eastern Europe had become not a buffer but a liability. There was no longer any socialism to defend.

For seven decades, the Soviet state had constructed an elaborate web of alliances and relationships designed to shield it from hostile neighbors and foreign powers. Shattered by the German invasion of 1941 and painstakingly rebuilt in the postwar years, this defensive architecture was consolidated by the signing of the Warsaw Pact, which afforded the Soviet state thirty-five years of tense but functional security. That architecture was progressively dismantled by the Solidarity movement and eventual free elections in Poland; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the deposition of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and of Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov; and the bloody overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania. By 1991 the web of international relations that had sustained Soviet power simply no longer existed. Ringed by former allies turned sovereign states, and by Soviet republics increasingly hostile in their demands to secede, Russia stood alone.

17 Moments in Soviet History - The Warsaw Pact Dissolves, by James von Geldern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.