Warsaw Pact: Molotov's NATO Bid, White-Cross Tanks and Romania's Defiance

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In 1954, hoping to block a rearmed West Germany from joining NATO, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed a neutral Germany and then asked that the Soviet Union itself be allowed into NATO. The United States, Britain and France saw a trap and refused. When West Germany entered NATO in May 1955, Moscow gathered its satellite states in Poland within days and signed the Warsaw Pact. Western officials called it a cardboard castle. The treaty promised mutual defense, non-intervention and equality among eight members, but the supreme commander and chief of staff were always Soviet officers, and in 36 years the alliance never fought NATO. Its only joint operations were against its own members.

Hungary's 1956 bid to leave ended with Soviet tanks in Budapest and thousands dead. In 1968 Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops crushed Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, justified afterward by the Brezhnev Doctrine. Some members resisted. Albania left in 1968 in protest, and Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania stayed in while expelling Soviet troops by 1958, ejecting KGB advisers and staying neutral in the Sino-Soviet split. In 1989 Poland's Solidarity broke the communist monopoly through elections, the Pan-European Picnic opened the Hungarian border to fleeing East Germans, and Mikhail Gorbachev declined to send tanks. The pact was formally dissolved in Prague in July 1991, and most former members later joined NATO.

• Invading tanks in Czechoslovakia were painted with white crosses because the Czechoslovak army used the same Soviet-built models.
• Documents declassified by Poland revealed Seven Days to the River Rhine, a plan for a nuclear-era invasion of Western Europe.
• Romania blocked Mongolia from joining the pact.
• Romania built its own TR-85 tank instead of relying on the Soviet supply chain.
• Moscow tolerated Romania because it bordered no Western state and Ceausescu ran a strict communist regime at home.