World History: Warsaw Pact

The Soviet Union viewed NATO as a threat. In response, the Soviets developed an alliance system in 1955 as part of their own containment policy. It was known as the Warsaw Pact. This alliance included the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Not every country joined the new alliances, however. India, for example, chose to remain unallied with either side. And China, the world’s largest communist country, came to distrust the Soviet Union. Like India, it remained unallied.

The pact was signed in Poland in 1955 and was officially called ‘The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance’. It was a military treaty, which bound its signatories to come to the aid of the others, should any one of them be the victim of foreign aggression.

Initially, it was stressed that the Warsaw treaty was based on total equality of each member but soon it became a powerful political tool for the Soviet Union to hold sway over its allies and harness the powers of their combined military. When Hungary tried to leave Warsaw pact, it was crushed. Similarly, in 1968, the Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia (with support from five other Pact members), after the Czech government began to exhibit ‘Imperialistic’ tendencies.

Following the diminishing power of the USSR in the 1980s and the eventual fall of Communism, Warsaw Pact became redundant. It was officially dissolved in Prague in 1991 after many countries withdrew from it.