Continuing the historical excursion into the past, today I will describe the military-political dimension of the so-called class solidarity, i.e. the functioning of the camp of socialist states as a military bloc.
The Warsaw Pact was the instrument for controlling the security policies of the USSR’s satellite states. It was concluded (as the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) in May 1955. It was a propaganda reaction to the inclusion of Germany in the ranks of NATO. The founding members were the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and also Albania (it left the alliance in 1968). The GDR joined in 1956, but did not survive to the end of the Alliance’s life (it left the military structures in September 1990).
The Warsaw Pact was part of the Soviet empire’s control of its European satellites. One of many, and not the most important. Until its establishment, political and military control was carried out with the help of bilateral mechanisms. Initially, the Warsaw Pact looked like a paper arrangement, which role was to give the features of a multilateral alliance to the total dependence of European socialist states (in security and other matters) on the USSR. All the allied armies were operationally subordinated to the Soviet command. During the war, they were to be an integral element of Soviet frontline groups. Bilateral agreements and agreements in the military sphere were drafted in the form of a list of duties on the part of the satellites towards the “big brother”. It was not until 1969 that the Statute of the United Armed Forces was adopted. And in 1979 it was renewed, extending the established principles of operation of the command to the times of war (Romania has never formally ratified the principles of operation of command organs during the war).
The United Command functioned as one of the dozen or so directorates of the Soviet general staff. The command functions were performed only by the Soviets. Officers from other Warsaw Treaty countries delegated to the staff did not account for more than 20 percent of the United Command Staff. And in wartime, Soviet generals would command allied units directly, without looking at national or allied structures.
During the war, the Polish Army was to deploy three general armies and an air force army. As part of the so-called Polish (coastal) front, they were to move to Denmark, northern Germany and the Netherlands. From the mid-1980s, Poland was obliged to allocate five armoured divisions, eleven mechanized divisions (including three reserve ones), two assault brigades and three air divisions for the times of war.
In the 1960s, a unified air defense system was built within the Warsaw Pact, linking the national systems of the member states. It involved joint airspace monitoring, an extensive radiolocation and communication network, and the appropriate deployment of missile systems and interceptors. Several dozen missile squadrons were deployed in Poland to counter air targets.
Due to its membership in the Warsaw Treaty, Poland had to accept on its own territory not only Soviet troops (our own troops were treated as sufficient only to cover the northern flank of the main line of Soviet troops), but also nuclear weapons. In total, more than 20 nuclear weapons warehouses were maintained outside the USSR. In Poland, warheads were stored in three Soviet depots (Templewo, Brzeźnica, Podborsk), from where they were to be distributed to Polish artillery units (armed with Elbrus and Luna systems) and airplanes (Su-22 planes). In total, it was 178 loads in the form of warheads and bombs. Only the Command of the United Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact could decide to distribute them. Of course, the Northern Group of Soviet Forces had nuclear weapons at their own disposal only (Szprotawa, Bagicz and other locations).
The Warsaw Pact had its political dimension. I experienced its functioning personally, although already in the declining period of the existence of the Warsaw Pact. Of course, multilateral diplomacy there had its own unique features.
Regular sessions of the Advisory Political Committee (with the participation of the first secretaries of communist parties from the Warsaw Pact countries) and the Committee of Ministers of Foreign Affairs were held. They formulated a common position of the alliance states on the most important issues of European (and not only) security. It was the forum of the Warsaw Treaty that was used to present important political initiatives, such as the one concerning a pan-European conference on cooperation and security (1969) or conventional disarmament in Europe (1986).
Undoubtedly, the Warsaw Pact became with time the playground for developing diplomatic activity in the satellite states since the 1960s. The GDR tried to convince its allies of its own vision of settling the German problem (insisting that first it should be recognized by the West). Poland counterattacked by pushing for its own vision (recognition of Poland’s western borders by Germany before the normalization of bilateral relations of FRG with socialist states). Romania showed its dissent (disagreement with breaking diplomatic relations with Israel and its condemnation after the war of 1967).
In the Gorbachev era one could get the impression that the basic goal of Soviet policy was to use the Treaty to maintain the cohesion of the socialist community as such, in which the cracks were becoming more and more evident. The allies began to diverge more and more in their views on Gorbachev’s policy (Hungary and over time Poland took a benevolent stance, while Romania or East Germany looked at perestroika with increasing fear). Gorbachev’s foreign policy was also increasingly polarizing (Hungary and Poland wanted to use it to open up more to the West). Bilateral tensions like the Hungarian-Romanian ones (against the background of the Hungarian minority) and the Polish-German tensions (dispute over the course of the approach track to Świnoujście) emerged.
All final documents of the meetings of the political bodies of the Warsaw Treaty were negotiated on the basis of drafts prepared in Moscow. Romanians, when they hosted the political meetings of the Pact, tried to submit their own documents, but the member states always opted for the drafting work to be carried out on the basis of Soviet proposals. And Romanians had to accept it bitterly.
Poland tried to make a breach in the practice of preparing drafts for negotiation before the meeting of the Advisory Political Committee in Warsaw in July 1988. The idea was that the host’s draft should be our own, and at the same time it should not be countered by an alternative Soviet text. The director of the Department of Studies and Programming of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerzy M. Nowak, who was to chair the negotiations on behalf of Poland on the final document of the Warsaw summit, convinced the management of the Ministry that we should come up with our own project. But our colleagues from the Department for Relations with the USSR, who were responsible for the affairs of the Warsaw Treaty, were quite skeptical. Nowak asked me for a draft. I wrote the document in good faith (as it seemed to me then, it was in line with the spirit of Gorbachev’s “common European house”, and perhaps even more). Yet our colleagues from the territorial department insisted that the project should first be shown in Moscow and that they should go to Moscow to discuss it. So I was not surprised that when we received the “revised” text after a dozen or so days, it was a weak reflection of our intentions. It is as if they did not reach Moscow.
The greatest disappointment, however, came when listening to the speeches of the leaders of the communist world during the plenary session of the APC. Jaruzelski’s text presented a gloomy vision of the situation in Europe, referred to the growing aggression of imperialism (and revanchism), and propheted confrontation. It differed little from the tirades of Ceausescu or Honecker. And it certainly differed greatly from the relaxing tone of Gorbachev. At that time, I had a friend in the “speechwriting” staff of Wiesław Górnicki who prepared speeches of Jaruzelski. “What’s happening? There were only scraps left of the draft prepared at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, I asked. “It was supposed to be as Florek (Defence Minister Florian Siwicki) wanted. We will not mess in the generals’ heads now” – I heard in reply.
In the negotiations over the political documents of the Warsaw Treaty, the Soviets assumed the role of a mediator. They marked clearly the red lines of their position at the beginning of the session. And these lines were rather respected by other countries. The “Soviet comrades” focused then on mediating and silencing disputes among their allies. When the Polish representatives who presided over the negotiations before the 1988 summit of the Warsaw Pact tried to submit a compromise, for example in the Hungarian-Romanian disputes, the Russians preferred to settle it with their participation.
I saw the political beginning of the end of the Warsaw Pact already in December 1988. Romanians then called an urgent conference in Bucharest in connection with the conclusion of the CSCE review meeting in Vienna. With the support of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, they directly asked their allies, especially the USSR, to block the draft final document of the Vienna meeting due to provisions on human rights and people-to-people contacts. The icy atmosphere of the meeting was intensified by the catastrophic appearance of Bucharest. A dozen or so degrees of frost, darkness, empty streets, empty shelves. The Soviets refused for the first time to meet the request. “If you have a problem, you have to report it yourself.” The frustration of the Romanians was unearthly. One hour after the meeting ended in failure, the heating in the hotel was turned off (and the return flight did not take off until the next day).
After the first non-communist government was established in Poland, the manner of conducting political discussions within the Warsaw Treaty had to change. Minister Skubiszewski managed to host the meeting of the Pact Foreign Ministers Committee in October 1989. The ideological ornaments had to disappear from the debates. And the negotiations became more partner-like.
The Warsaw Pact never had its own secretariat. Such an idea emerged in the last years of its operation, but the Pact was dissolved sooner than such a secretariat would have been established. The technical support to the Warsaw Treaty political bodies was ensured by a team of employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. There was no permanent working political body (at the level of ambassadors). A few years before the dissolution, the Group of Mutual Current Information was established, but it remained insignificant.
The Warsaw Pact, which was supposed to be a collective defense agreement, was never used for this purpose. On the other hand, it was used to pacify out-of-control members of the alliance or to sow fear of Soviet intervention.
Proletarian internationalism, as a solidarity doctrine, began to serve as a justification for armed interventions in socialist states to prevent their emancipation. This is how the Brezhnev doctrine was born which we will discuss next week.
The now shameful tradition of using allied structures to pacify internal protests and riots is continued by the Collective Security Treaty Organization. At the request of the clearly panicked president of Kazakhstan, it sent in 2022 a contingent of Russian troops (and Armenian, Belarusian and Kirghiz troops to maintain the fiction of collective action) to protect state facilities, and above all as a signal that where, how, but in Kazakhstan no change of government without Russia will be tolerated.
