The Eastern European states that were members of the Warsaw Pact, NATO's communist counterpart of the Cold War, had quite a bit to say. They could even enforce decisions in mighty Moscow. In this way they had a major influence on the course of the Cold War. This is apparent from the doctoral research of historian Laurien Crump of Utrecht University.
In 1955 West Germany received permission from the Americans to rearm and to join the Western military alliance NATO. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev saw this as such a threat that he called on the communist countries in Eastern Europe to form their own alliance. On May 14, 1955, a treaty was signed in the Polish capital of Warsaw, which soon became known as the Warsaw Pact. As with NATO, the members of the pact promised to defend each other if one or more members were attacked.
Partly because troops from Warsaw Pact countries violently crushed popular uprisings in Member States Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), many historians saw the pact as an extension of Moscow's power. The pact seemed more like an umbrella of loose links between the mighty Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites than a truly equal alliance like NATO. When the archives in Eastern Europe opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few historians bothered to look at the Warsaw Pact from the other side, that is, from the side of the small Eastern European member states.
Utrecht historian Laurien Crump did just that for her dissertation and delved into archives in Berlin, Bucharest and Rome that had never been consulted before. Her conclusion gives a special look behind the scenes of the Warsaw Pact, where it turns out that it was certainly not just the Soviet Union that pulled the strings. During the 1960s, member states increasingly used the alliance as an instrument to influence the Soviet Union and promote their own national interests, rather than the other way around.
Red Schism
Two factors are of great importance, according to Crump. In 1956 Khrushchev distanced himself from the brutal domestic policies of his predecessor Joseph Stalin and put an end to the personality cult surrounding the old dictator. This de-Stalinization fell very badly with the Chinese leader Mao, for whom Stalin was the great example. China therefore began to criticize the leading role of the Soviet Union within communism. With the final split between China and the Soviet Union, the so-called Red Schism in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union's power within global communism began to waver. Also within the communist world there was suddenly a choice between two power blocs.
As the smallest Warsaw Pact member, the wayward communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania, began to play China and the Soviet Union against each other. The country eventually sided with Mao's China and officially left the pact in 1968. The rest always sided with Moscow, but Hoxha's critical actions showed that the alliance could be used to put pressure on the Soviet Union.
Another development that permanently undermined the power of the Soviet Union within the Warsaw Pact was the German question:the tensions over rearmament (possibly even with nuclear weapons!), the exodus of East Berlin, and in response the construction of the Berlin Wall. The growing military power of West Germany forced the Soviet leadership to take the interests of countries like the GDR and Poland more seriously.
Equal alliance
The GDR and Poland tried to persuade Khrushchev not to make any concessions regarding the rearmament of West Germany, which was seen as a major security threat. Working together within the Warsaw Pact gave them more influence than alone. But Romania, in particular, was always obnoxious and made frequent use of its veto right. Romania especially wanted to be more independent and had little interest in taking a hard line on the German question. It acted as a mediator in the China-Soviet conflict and thus placed itself above the other member states.
As the interests of the member states slowly began to diverge, the Soviet Union itself lost more and more control. The tensions between Poland and the GDR on the one hand and the flood of Romanian vetoes on the other forced the other Eastern European countries to take sharp stances as well. More and more meetings were held, in which, among other things, the ranks had to be closed on matters such as the Vietnam War. China and the Soviet Union were diametrically opposed in this regard. The Romanians managed to exploit these tensions by putting pressure on the Russians, and even dictated a compromise on the joint declaration on Vietnam.
Romania's influence within the Warsaw Pact remained strong. The Romanian party leadership managed to ensure that national armies did not fall under a central Warsaw Pact command, but that the member states retained their own armed forces. Like NATO, the pact cannot organize invasions into its own member states. Although it is often said that way, the military intervention during the Prague Spring in 1968 was not a matter for the Warsaw Pact.
At a large meeting in March 1969, for the first time in the history of the Warsaw Pact, real agreement was reached on important political and military matters. With the establishment of various regular consultative bodies, a Committee of Defense Ministers and a Military, the Warsaw Pact became a truly equal alliance and in many ways resembled NATO. The influence that the small Eastern European countries had on the mighty Soviet Union through this treaty organization – and thus on the course of the entire Cold War – would remain noticeable until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.