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Warsaw Pact

The Warsaw Pact (WP),[d] formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA),[e] was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The term "Warsaw Pact" commonly refers to both the treaty itself and its resultant defensive alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization[5] (WTO).[f] The Warsaw Pact was the military and economic complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the regional economic organization for the Eastern Bloc states of Central and Eastern Europe.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Not to be confused with Warsaw Convention or Treaty of Warsaw.

Abbreviation

TFCMA, WP

14 May 1955 (1955-05-14)

1 July 1991 (1991-07-01)

Dominated by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Western Bloc.[17][18] There was no direct military confrontation between the two organizations; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs.[18] The Warsaw Pact's largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, its own member state, in August 1968 (with the participation of all pact nations except Albania and Romania),[17] which, in part, resulted in Albania withdrawing from the pact less than one month later. The pact began to unravel with the spread of the Revolutions of 1989 through the Eastern Bloc, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland,[19] its electoral success in June 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989.[20]


East Germany withdrew from the pact following German reunification in 1990. On 25 February 1991, at a meeting in Hungary, the pact was declared at an end by the defense and foreign ministers of the six remaining member states. The USSR itself was dissolved in December 1991, although most of the former Soviet republics formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization shortly thereafter. In the following 20 years, the Warsaw Pact countries outside the USSR each joined NATO (East Germany through its reunification with West Germany; and the Czech Republic and Slovakia as separate countries), as did the Baltic states.

People's Socialist Republic of Albania (withheld support in 1961 because of the Albanian–Soviet split, but formally withdrew on 13 September 1968)

Albania

  (German Democratic Republic; officially withdrew on 24 September 1990 in preparation for German reunification, with Soviet consent and a "remarkable yet hardly noticed" ceremony, ceasing to exist altogether at midnight on 3 October)[60][61][62][63][64]

East Germany

Hungarian People's Republic (temporarily withdrew from 1–4 November 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution)[59]

Hungarian People's Republic

Socialist Republic of Romania (the only independent permanent non-Soviet member of the Warsaw Pact, having freed itself from its Soviet satellite status by the early 1960s)[1][2]

Socialist Republic of Romania

 [59]

Soviet Union

"" (Poland, 1962)

Szczecin

"Vltava" (, 1966)

Czechoslovakia

Operation "Rhodope" (, 1967)

Bulgaria

"Oder-Neisse" (, 1969)

East Germany

Przyjaźń 84 (, 1984)

Poland

Shield 84 (, 1984)[115]

Czechoslovakia

Eastern Bloc

Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948

Finlandization

Russosphere

Soviet Empire

Sovietization

– any treaty establishing close ties between countries

Treaty of friendship

. North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"What was the Warsaw Pact?"

The Woodrow Wilson Center Cold War International History Project's Warsaw Pact Document Collection

Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security

(1989)

Library of Congress / Federal Research Division / Country Studies / Area Handbook Series / Soviet Union / Appendix C: The Warsaw Pact

Map of Russia and the Warsaw Pact (omniatlas.com)

Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Hungary 1961–1991

by Hugh Collins Embry. Contain extensive documentation of the Pact's first 13 years.

The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1968