It was one of those attempts to unite the countries but always for interests that, finally, end up colliding with each other. Does the Warsaw Pact ring a bell? It is one of the key moments in the story after and so that you understand the act well, we are going to explain everything about the Warsaw Pact: what it is, objectives and characteristics of this international agreement.
Although it is often overlooked or forgotten in historical memory, the Warsaw pact was one of the first join attempts what can we define as reactionaries in the face of the capitalist international advance led by the United States after the Second World War and the Cold War entered.
In other words, the Warsaw Pact emerged, to a large extent, as a response to the refusal of Western European countries to accept the proposals made by the Soviet Union to try to consolidate a European security system.
In this article we will try to make a synthetic overview of what it meant, the objectives it pursued and the characteristics of a pact that, a priori, can be understood as a kind of alliance of nations as equals, but which was not.
What is the Warsaw Pact?
On May 14, 1955, in Warsaw, the capital city of Poland from which it takes its name, the Pact begins. Present at this meeting were the leaders of the different Socialist Republics of the moment, in addition to the USSR:
- Poland
- Czechoslovakia
- East Germany
- Hungary
- Romania
- Albanian
- Bulgaria
Also, the Chinese defense minister was invited as a guest. As you can see, it was a pact that was made between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, The Warsaw Pact lasted for 20 years, renewable. and whoever wanted to withdraw from it had to notify it at least 1 year in advance.
One of the reasons that are mostly mentioned as causing or covenant triggers is the incorporation of West Germany into NATO (NATO) and, in general, to the capitalist military bloc during the Cold War.
In fact, the Warsaw Pact can be considered a mere Soviet replica of what is known as the capitalist military bloc, however, to say that would be to oversimplify a historical fact, referring to only the superficial layer of what it is.
To delve into the subject, we should try to investigate the internal causes of the USSR that led to the proposal of the pact, we will see that there is a much more complex background and we will understand that it should not be reduced to a simple competition between the two world powers of the time .
The Soviet motivation is, therefore, also international in the sense of trying to value and ratify the different supports that the socialist government had at the time, even becoming an attempt to clean up and break with the totalitarian Stalinist past. Soviet.
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Objectives of the Warsaw Pact
In order to understand what was happening in the Soviet Union around 1955, we must go back to the death of the leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, that is, two years before the Warsaw Pact and approximately a decade after the end of World War II. .
A specific feature of Stalin’s management is that he endowed the government with a characteristic and unique doctrine or conception that emerges from what is exposed both in the theories of Marx-Engels (communism) and those of Lenin (Marxism-Leninism, although the latter already had a certain tendency towards totalitarianism, as several historians affirm) that was characterized as being totalitarian.
Stalinism is the cause of a large part of the crimes caused during the Soviet era after the Bolshevik Revolution, to a large extent, by authoritarianism and strict Soviet police control and the repression derived from a personality that did not accept criticism of its management. .
Clearly, once Stalin died, many opponents of the Soviet regime (which can vary in the broad political spectrum that we inherited and expanded from the 20th century) raised their voices and tried to withdraw or move away from the Union or, if they were there, tried to change the political system. which he had been directing for -almost- 40 years. That is how Khrushchev and Bulganin (Stalin’s successors) conceive this Warsaw pact like a opportunity to regain strength in Central and Eastern Europe and to get the Soviet satellite states to stop being known for their police terror and more for their faithful support of the socialist model (which was not authoritarian).
To strip the USSR of its authoritarianism, the Warsaw Pact was intended to have the appearance of a forum where ideas could be exchanged and that it was, rather, a kind of alliance in which each country could contribute and reaffirm its ideas on the socialist cause. Thus, the application of political strategies ceased to be solely and exclusively the product of police terror and the pressure that the USSR exerted on its satellite states, to being a set of measures negotiated by the different leaders of each nation.
In this sense, on the one hand, the Warsaw Pact served to attempt to tighten control over the satellite republics in a peaceful and civilized manner in Central and Eastern Europe in the eyes of the world and, on the other, it served to open the doors to other undecided states that wanted to adhere to the Soviet socialist model as an alternative to the capitalist model.
Ultimately, it would be a Soviet bloc response to US-led capitalist military formationIn this sense, let us remember that the second half of the 20th century was a fight to see who would win the battle between the US and the USSR, specifically, the Paris agreements.
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Characteristics of the Warsaw Pact
Previously we have made a kind of prelude to the characteristics of the Warsaw Pact, however, you should know that the main characteristic is that the USSR acted as leader of that alliance and that, even in order to configure its defensive and offensive strategies, it divided the alliance on three flanks:
- North flank: Germany and Poland, the Soviet areas, was the most important because of its proximity to West Germany.
- Central flank: Czechoslovakia and Hungary, less important than the north, but important if there was any armed conflict.
- South flank: made up of Romania, Albania, Bulgaria and with the help of Yugoslavia which, although it did not join the pact (due to Tito’s authoritarianism), was more likely to ally with the USSR than with the capitalist bloc (due to ideological proximity) .
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