Definition of Warsaw Pact

It was the response to Western NATO by the Soviet Union and its European allies and satellites, which held a pulse from after World War II until 1989.

The Warsaw Pact is a mutual defense organization, similar and antagonistic to NATO, and formed in 1955 by various countries of the so-called “eastern bloc”.

The signatories were the USSR, Poland, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania (in 1968, this would withdraw, constituting together with Yugoslavia the nations of government Communist not aligned in Europe).

The gestation of the Warsaw Pact must also be understood in the tensions within the communist bloc itself, which would lead China to break with the USSR.

The Pact (signed, as its name suggests, in the Polish capital) was of mutual assistance in case of conflict, but it also allowed the USSR to maintain tighter control over its satellites, in some of which the Communist governments still had to prop themselves up as they were reeling from pressure from moderate and leftist parties. the bourgeoisie.

Although these had not reached the establishment of a democracy parliamentary, as this was the "arrangement" that Stalin had reached with the Western allies, there was a certain level of social tension that led to the respective communist governments not having absolute control of the situation.

It was this that led to the two interventions in countries of the same Warsaw Pact: Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

In 1956 it was Hungary's turn; A series of student demonstrations led to an open revolt against the government of the Hungarian Communist Party, which was joined by Hungarian troops and citizenship.

A new government, headed by Imre Nagy, declares its intention to liberalize the politics Hungarian (in practice, lead the country to a participatory democracy), and abandon the Warsaw Pact. At the beginning of December 1956, Soviet troops entered Budapest, initiating the repression of the uprising.

Nagy will be arrested and die, two years later, executed by the Soviets after a secret farce-trial.

The intervention in Hungary was carried out under the auspices of the Warsaw Pact, and earned Soviet orthodoxy criticism from the communist parties of Western Europe.

In the same way as in Hungary, Soviet troops, under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact, invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to stop a movement politician who, known as the “Spring from prague”Threatened to end the dominant status quo of the communist party to reach a socialism more open and democratic, the so-called “socialism with a human face”.

On this occasion, troops from the GDR, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary also took part with the Soviets in the operation. Romania refused due to its previous disagreements with Moscow.

The Cold War was the only thing that explained the union of the countries that signed the Warsaw Pact, until the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The Perestroika carried out in the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev opened the hermetic communist policy not only of the Soviet country, but of the entire bloc of eastern countries, which led to the rise of new governments in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.

They quickly questioned their membership in the Pact as a way to free themselves from the Soviet yoke.

In January 1991, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia announced their withdrawal from the Pact. It was the beginning of the end of this organization that, for practical purposes, ceased to exist a few months later.

Paradoxically, many of the countries that formerly made up the Warsaw Pact, as well as new countries that emerged from the disintegration of the USSR, have ended up being part of NATO.

Among others, this has been the case in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Albania.

Photo: Fotolia - Andrey_Lobachev

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