The Warsaw PACT at Thirty: Soviet and East European Successes and Failures

Author(s):  
Marco Carnovale
1983 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 362
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Goldberg ◽  
A. Ross Johnson ◽  
Robert W. Dean ◽  
Alexander Alexiev
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 56-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radoslav A. Yordanov

This article examines the policies of Warsaw Pact countries toward Chile from 1964, when Eduardo Frei was elected Chilean president, until 1973, when Frei's successor, Salvador Allende, was removed in a military coup. The article traces the role of the Soviet Union and East European countries in the ensuing international campaign raised in support of Chile's left wing, most notably in support of the Chilean Communist Party leader Luis Corvalán. The account here adds to the existing historiography of this momentous ten-year period in Chile's history, one marked by two democratic presidential elections, the growing covert intervention of both Washington and Moscow in Chile's politics, mass strikes and popular unrest against Allende's government, a violent military coup, and intense political repression in the coup's aftermath. The article gives particular weight to the role of the East European countries in advancing the interests of the Soviet bloc in South America. By consulting a wide array of declassified documents in East European capitals and in Santiago, this article helps to explain why Soviet and East European leaders attached great importance to Chile and why they ultimately were unable to develop more comprehensive political, economic, and cultural relations with that South American country.


1982 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 463
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Pierre ◽  
A. Ross Johnson ◽  
Robert W. Dean ◽  
Alexander Alexiev
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Zoltan Barany

This chapter explains why politicians and generals in the six East European Warsaw Pact member states (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania) and in China reacted to the upheavals and revolutions so differently. In particular, this chapter explains why senior officers in Poland and Hungary remained inactive during the transitions there, why the Bulgarian army leadership supported the “elite transfer” in Sofia, and how the top brass in Czechoslovakia and East Germany reacted to the mass demonstrations in their principal cities. The bulk of this chapter, however, is devoted to China and Romania, where bona fide uprisings—one failed, one successful—took place, and the armed forces did turn their guns against the people, albeit reluctantly and in very different circumstances.


Author(s):  
George W. Breslauer

Brezhnev’s Bureaucratic Leninism was broadly emulated (or imposed) in East European communist regimes. But it was controversial and led to many rejections. The Prague Spring of 1968 was an effort to democratize the communist party from within. It was crushed by Warsaw Pact troops. Poland experienced a repeated wave of worker rebellions, as well as a cross-class alliance that resulted in Solidarity almost coming to power, until it was crushed in 1981 by Polish special-service troops. Hungary experimented with narrow-scope marketization of its economy, insufficient to create prosperity, but enough to avoid the extent of economic stagnation plaguing the Soviet Union. All these set the stage for Gorbachev’s reforms.


1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-363
Author(s):  
Karen Dawisha

One of the major issues surrounding the perennial debates over Soviet alliance management is whether the Soviet leadership considers its military position vis-à-vis Western Europe to be a more important determinant of policy than the political stability of its East European allies. Moscow showed itself willing to use force to achieve its objectives in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but analysts are not agreed either on the nature of those objectives or on the wider priorities governing Soviet policy. Before 1968 it was widely believed that security considerations relating to the unity and strength of the Warsaw Pact dominated Soviet thinking. It was assumed that East European regimes would be allowed to undertake some, primarily economic, reforms provided they did not repeat the mistake made by the Hungarians in 1956 of calling for a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This belief in the supremacy of strategic considerations led the Czechoslovaks, and many Western analysts, to miscalculate both the extent of the Soviet Union's ideological disagreement with the reform movement and the interrelationships between political and strategic considerations.


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