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Research Notes and Conference Reports

"We Are in a Bind" Polish and Czechoslovak Attempts at Reforming the Warsaw Pact, 1956-1969

By Vojtech Mastny

The internal documents on the Warsaw Pact that are becoming available from the archives of its former Central and Eastern European members (hardly any are yet open from the former Soviet Union) reveal how misconceived the Western disposition to regard the Communist alliance as the functional counterpart of NATO was. Yet, equally mistaken was the supposition that Moscow's allies uniformly resented their membership in the organization, and consequently strove to loosen or even abolish it. As evident from the diverse attempts at reforming the Warsaw Pact, the reality was not so straightforward, nor was it the same at different times. The documents printed below, which have never been published in English before, show that Polish generals in 1956 and their Czechoslovak counterparts in 1968 sought to preserve the alliance but to alter it in unexpected ways.

The attempts at reforming the Warsaw Pact must be measured against the overwhelming dependence of Central and Eastern European countries on Moscow at the time of the launching of the alliance in 1955 and consider that initially its purpose was very different from what it became later. The establishment of the Communist alliance six years after the creation of NATO has always been something of a puzzle. It occurred when the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev was actively pursuing détente with the West and seeking to demilitarize the Cold War.1

Only recently has archival evidence from the defunct Soviet bloc allowed us to place the signing of the Warsaw Pact firmly within the context of Khrushchev's effort to bring about a new European security system, dominated by the Soviet Union. The effort, prompted by the prospective admission of West Germany into NATO in accordance with the October 1954 Paris agreements, was aimed at radically reshaping the European security environment formed by the Cold War. It rested on the fallacious assumption that the Western powers could be maneuvered by political means into a position in which they would have no choice but to acquiesce against their will in changes they considered incompatible with their vital interests.

According to the scenario initiated by Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav M. Molotov but elaborated and increasingly masterminded by Khrushchev, the feat was to

be accomplished by staging an all-European security conference from which the United States would be excluded and the agenda of which would be set and controlled by Moscow posing as the main guarantor of European security. The Soviet-sponsored gathering of Communist chiefs in the Polish capital in May 1955, at which the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) was formally inaugurated, had initially been intended as a step toward such a conference. The text of the treaty, intended for publication, was drafted by Molotov's assistants at the Foreign Ministry in December 1954.3 It was only a month before the originally scheduled date of April 25 that the Soviet leadership decided to give the Warsaw meeting a military character by instructing Minister of Defense Marshal Georgii K. Zhukov at short notice to draft the appropriate documents. By the time they were forwarded to the East European party secretaries for information on May 2, the inauguration of the alliance had been moved to May 11-14.5

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At the founding session, which amounted to little more than a ritual consecration of the project prepared in Moscow, the alliance treaty was passed with but minor amendments. These were proposed by some of the Central and Eastern European participants but—judging from the exceedingly orderly minutes of the session-had probably been commissioned in advance by Molotov for the sole purpose of providing the appearance of a "discussion." Similarly perfunctory was the acceptance of the secret provisions specifying the size of the army, navy, and air force contingents the Soviet Union made its dependencies contribute for the supposedly common cause.' Polish general Tadeusz Pióro, who as a young colonel was given the task of taking minutes at the meeting where Zhukov made the assignments, has recalled how the originally comprehensive record had to be repeatedly whittled down. until nothing of substance was left on paper, thus allowing the Soviet managers to set the quotas as they pleased.

The important omission at the Warsaw gathering was the statute of the unified command, the draft of which was only sent to the Eastern European leaders by Khrushchev four months later and was approved at the first meeting of the alliance's political consultative committee in Prague on 27-28 January 1956.9 It was this top secret document [Document No. 1], classified during the entire existence

of the Warsaw Pact, that later became a major cause of dissatisfaction among its members. The statute, which gave its military chief extensive prerogatives in controlling their armed forces, grew in importance once the original purpose of the alliance-Khrushchev's promotion of a new European security system-foundered on Western resistance. Moscow's latitude in running the Warsaw Pact through its Soviet supreme commander and Soviet chief of staff then became all the greater since its supposedly collective institutions, namely, a permanent secretariat and a standing commission on foreign affairs envisaged at the Prague meeting, were in fact not created.10 Still, in view of the bilateral “mutual defense” treaties that had already before put Eastern European armed forces at Soviet disposal, the added chain of command was largely superfluous. This justified a contemporary NATO assessment of the Warsaw Pact as “a cardboard castle . . . carefully erected over what most observers considered an already perfectly adequate blockhouse, . . . intended to be advertised as being capable of being dismantled, piece by piece, in return for corresponding segments of NATO.”’11

The lack of substance would not have mattered if the unexpected crises in Poland and Hungary in the fall of 1956 had not compelled the Soviet Union to take its allies more seriously. Its declaration on relations among socialist states, issued on October 30 in a vain attempt to stem the tide of revolution in Hungary by political means, signaled a willingness to revise the arbitrary provisions of the Warsaw Pact, regulate the presence of Soviet forces on the territory of its member states, and recall the unwanted Soviet military advisers there.12 The Polish proposals printed below [Document No. 2] were prepared on November 3 in direct response to the declaration. They show how much the self-confidence of the Soviet empire's largest nation had increased after the Kremlin's reluctant acceptance of its new national communist leadership under party secretary Władysław Gomułka, followed by the dismissal of the widely resented Soviet marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovskii as defense minister.

The Poles prepared their proposals regardless of the progressing Soviet military intervention in Hungary, which Moscow defended as being allegedly justified under the provisions of the Warsaw Pact.13 Gomułka disapproved of the intervention, being understandably concerned about its possible effect upon Soviet intentions towards his own regime which, as we know today, the Kremlin leaders had only provisionally decided to tolerate under Chinese pressure.14 He let the Polish general staff form a special commission to elaborate proposals for a reform of the Warsaw Pact and Poland's future role in it. On behalf of the commission, deputy chief of staff Gen. Jan Drzewiecki prepared not only a biting commentary on the secret May 1955 statute on the powers of the supreme commander but also a "legal analysis" of the "agreements" about the ten-year plan for the development of Poland's armed forces, imposed by Moscow before and after the Warsaw Pact was signed.15

He argued that the two agreements lacked proper legal basis and were not truly bilateral because they consisted of Polish obligations only. Referring to the secret military annexes to the Warsaw treaty, Drzewiecki noted that not even his country's foreign minister had been informed about them.

The final text of Drzewiecki's proposal, sent to Gomułka on 7 November 1956, summed up the Polish case for the reform of the alliance and spelled out the country's proposed obligations within it.16 Taking into account the international situation-meaning NATO member West Germany's pending claim to the German territories annexed by Poland after World War II—the document did not question the desirability of the Warsaw Pact to bolster Poland's national security but found its military provisions in need of a thorough revision. The author took exception to the status of the supreme commander and his chief of staff as supranational officials with prerogatives incompatible with the maintenance of Polish independence and sovereignty, to the signatories' "purely formal" representation on the unified command, to the arbitrary assignment of national contingents to the alliance, and-most topically in view of the Soviet intervention in Hungary-to the lack of regulations concerning Soviet military deployments on the territories of the other member states.17

As the Soviet intervention in Hungary became an accomplished fact (which caused Gomułka to abandon his opposition to it), 18 the Poles found it preferable to separate their radical critique of the Warsaw Pact from their demand for the regulation of Soviet military presence on their territory. This had been maintained since the end of World War II mainly to facilitate Moscow's communication with its occupation troops in East Germany. Invoking the status of foreign forces within NATO territory as an example and alluding even to the manner in which American military presence was made acceptable in such countries as the Philippines, Libya, and Ethiopia, the Polish demand proved fortunate in its timing.19 Still defensive about the crackdown in Hungary, the Soviet Union on December 17 granted Poland a more favorable status-of-forces agreement than any other country. It provided for Polish jurisdiction in case of violations of Polish law by Soviet military personnel and for advance notice to the Polish government of any movement of Soviet troops. Although the former provision was subsequently evaded in practice, the latter was generally honored the exception being the surreptitious stationing of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Poland without the knowledge of its government.20

Having thus made one concession granting Poland special status within the Soviet empire, Moscow was not in a mood to entertain in addition a proposal for revamping the Warsaw Pact. When Polish Defense Minister Marian Spychalski brought up the subject during his visit to the Soviet capital in January 1957, the alliance's supreme commander, Marshal Ivan S. Koney, felt

personally offended. He was aghast at the idea that his office should be filled by rotation. "What do you imagine," he exploded, "that we will make some NATO here?" As a result, the proposal was shelved,22 leaving the Warsaw Pact unreformed for another decade. Although Khrushchev did relieve the East Europeans' military burden as part of his overall reduction of expenditures on conventional forces, he had no incentive to further develop the Warsaw Pact. In the years that followed, he instead tried to use it mainly as a platform for launching his assorted diplomatic initiatives during irregular meetings of the alliance's political consultative committee.

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When the idea of reform re-emerged ten years later, the circumstances were altogether different. Khrushchev's innovative attempt to reduce the Soviet Union's dependence on military power by cutting its conventional forces had failed. The Soviet military had succeeded in instilling the Warsaw Pact with more substance in 1961 by instituting the annual practice of joint maneuvers that imitated both nuclear and conventional warfare in an increasingly realistic fashion. Three years later, Khrushchev was replaced as party general secretary by Leonid I. Brezhnev, who was dedicated to reversing his predecessor's reductions of conventional forces while accelerating the expansion of the nuclear ones as well. Still, the growing utilization of the Warsaw Pact for military purposes proceeded without building up its structure. And when the initiative in this direction was finally taken in January 1966, it originated with the Soviet Union rather than its junior partners.23

Seeking to compensate by expanded military competition for the increasingly palpable Soviet deficiencies in other fields, Brezhnev opened the drive for a reform of the Warsaw Pact to make it into a genuine, rather than merely formal, counterpart of NATO. The Soviet Union envisaged strengthening the alliance's original statute and establishing additional institutions along the lines already decided in 1956. This meant particularly the clarification of the powers of the supreme commander and the creation of a unified military staff, a standing commission on foreign policy, a committee on technology, and a permanent secretariat. Recognizing how much Moscow's relationship with its Central and Eastern European dependencies had changed since the Stalin and early Khrushchev years, Brezhnev invited their input rather than attempting merely to dictate what was to be done and how.

Responding to the invitation, Poland immediately prepared two substantive memoranda. In the first [Document No. 3], Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki outlined how the alliance's highest political organ, the political consultative committee, ought to be transformed from an inconsequential entity given to holding "irregular summit meetings, usually ill-prepared, and adopting spectacular agreements," into a forum for systematic consultation about not only general matters but also

specific issues of current policy-something on the order of the North Atlantic Council.24 The second memorandum [Document No. 4] proposed measures aimed at ensuring the Warsaw Pact's smaller members real rather than merely ritual input into decisions of military importance, such as the Soviet Union's deployment of its nuclear weapons.25 The document called for the creation of a multinational military council that would dilute the overwhelming authority of the Soviet supreme commander-another allusion to the NATO model-and recommended his detachment from the structure of the Soviet armed forces. It proposed proportional representation of all its member states on the alliance's military staff except for the Soviet Union, which would be represented there by 31 per cent.

In deference to Soviet wishes, the Poles deleted the most radical of these ideas, particularly the transformation of the political consultative committee into a deliberative and decision-making body akin to the North Atlantic Council, before the Warsaw Pact's deputy foreign ministers convened under Moscow's auspices in February 1966 to push the reform forward.26 The more radical initiative came instead from Romanian representative Mircea Malița who, pleading insufficient authority to agree to anything, shocked the other participants by what some of them rightly perceived as trying to paralyze the alliance by transforming it into a noncommittal discussion club.27 Unlike the Poles, who wanted expanded room for action as partners in a revitalized Warsaw Pact, the Romanians tried to achieve their freedom of action by minimizing the Soviet role in its functioning.

It was with rather than against Moscow that Poland under Gomułka, who had since 1956 deteriorated from Eastern Europe's foremost champion of reform to a political reactionary, became the most enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet-sponsored reorganization of the alliance into an institutional counterpart of NATO. While Polish officials again sought to alleviate their country's recently increased defense burden, they no longer clamored for doing so at the expense of the alliance's cohesion; that role had meanwhile been adopted by the Romanians.

Bucharest steadfastly resisted the establishment of any organs that would make it easier for Moscow to use and abuse the Warsaw Pact for its own purposes, especially in wartime. While the brush with a nuclear disaster during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had thoroughly frightened Moscow's allies, only the Romanians had gone so far as to betray their alliance commitments by secretly offering the United States assurances of neutrality in case of a nuclear conflict between the two blocs.28 Afterward, they consistently pursued the policy of limiting their obligations within the Warsaw Pact and loosening it as best as they could.

The cause of transforming the alliance to make it both stronger and more acceptable to all its members, including the Soviet Union, was embraced in 1968 by the

Czechoslovak communist reformers. Their desire to change the Warsaw Pact was broadly known at the time, particularly from the candid interview given on 15 July 1968 by the Czechoslovak army's chief political officer, Gen. Václav Prchlík, and contributed to the Soviet decision to crush the reform movement by force of arms.29 Yet the extent of their efforts, as well as its limitations, remained obscure until the recent publication in Prague of selected documents on the military aspects of the 1968 crisis, 30 which can now be supplemented by extensive additional sources from the Czech Military Historical Archives.

Of the two documents printed below, the rambling exposé by the Czechoslovak chief of general staff, Gen. Otakar Rytíř, [Document No. 5] gives a vivid account of the "great bind" in which the Warsaw Pact countries found themselves by the late nineteen-sixties. This was the result of the Soviet-dictated resumption of high military spending aimed at the expansion and modernization of their conventional armed forces. The policy was in part an attempt to respond in kind to NATO's strategy of flexible response, formally adopted in 1967 but anticipated for at least six years before.31 Rytíř's remarks were suggestive of the resulting tensions within the Soviet-led alliance, the full extent of which can be gleaned from many other archival documents.32 The often acrimonious negotiations with Moscow about the military budget paralleled the perennial disputes between Washington and its NATO allies about burden-sharing. Unlike its Communist counterpart, however, the Western alliance was able to develop effective institutions and procedures which, besides its members' dedication to the democratic bargaining process, ensured NATO's continued viability.

For all his lack of sophistication and crudeness of expression, the Czech general grasped better than the Soviet marshals and their political mentors the heart of the problem that in the fullness of time would critically contribute to the collapse of the communist alliance-its inability to keep up with its capitalist rival in economic and technological competition. He neither desired nor anticipated this outcome but did not see any good way out of the bind either. Rather than solving the essential problem, he could only demand for his country an equal position in the alliance.

The question of how such a position would make the Warsaw Pact more viable is addressed in Document No. 6, which originated with the staff of the Klement Gottwald Military Political Academy-the institution designed to supply the ideological underpinning of the Czechoslovak military establishment. The text, misleadingly referred to in earlier Western literature as the "Gottwald memorandum" (as if it had been composed by the deceased Stalinist chief of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after whom the school was named), was published in a Prague newspaper in 1968,34 but never received abroad the attention it deserves. This has been no doubt in part because of its often awkward prose, mixing

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Marxist-Leninist jargon with the phraseology of Western "defense intellectuals." Yet amid some pontificating and belaboring the obvious, there are remarkably fresh ideas that put the document way ahead of its time.

If Rytíř's remarks sometimes read like wisecracks of the Good Soldier Schweik35 in a general's uniform, the memorandum is dead-serious. Its stands out for its utter lack of illusions about the small Central European nations' chances of physical survival in a general war between the two alliances and for its commendably level-headed rejection of the concept of mutual deterrence on which Europe's security was often believed to be resting. While attracted to the then-fashionable systems analysis approach to military affairs, the authors of the document in fact puncture the pretensions of both the Western proponents of mutual deterrence, who tried to use it to prop up the intensely ambiguous strategy of flexible response,36 and of their Soviet imitators, who were vainly searching for a way to defeat NATO without provoking a nuclear war.

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The memorandum offers revealing insights into the thinking that motivated Moscow's military posture in the early years of the Cold War. It maintains retrospectively that under Stalin the Soviet and East European armies under his control were being prepared to respond to an expected Western attack by launching a counteroffensive aimed at establishing complete Soviet hegemony in Europe. Although such a plan has not been corroborated by contemporary Soviet evidence it would have been consistent with the prevailing Western fears at the time. For their part, the authors of the memorandum, while paying the customary obeisance to the vision of a final victory of "socialism," scarcely hide their preference for a Europe whose ideological divisions have been gradually erased by common security concerns.

In deriding attempts at "directing an army's development in accordance with simple logic, empiricism, and historical analogy," the memorandum dismisses as fallacy Moscow's insistence on the alleged Western military threat. That fallacy, nourished by the Soviet memory of a narrow escape from defeat after the Nazi surprise attack in 1941, was not shared by any of Moscow's Warsaw Pact partners, who had not experienced the same trauma of their regime tottering under enemy assault. The Czech authors' criticism of the "naively pragmatic realist approach [that] analyzes relations among sovereign states from the point of view of either war or peace" foreshadowed the frame of mind that would eventually bring the Cold War to an end. Once a later generation of Soviet leaders would divest themselves from the notion that their state was being threatened from the outside, they would defy the realist mantra by declining to defend its supposedly vital interests, and allow their empire to disintegrate.

Free from the security preconceptions weighing on both superpowers, the Czechoslovak theorists sensed that the very feasibility and acceptability of war had radically

changed, at least in the European context, thus anticipating the post-Cold War era better than most of their contemporaries. Yet the conditions of their time, besides their residual Marxist thinking, prevented them from drawing any substantive conclusions. Instead, fascinated by the Israeli feats in the 1967 Six Day War, in their conclusion they focused instead merely on the desirability of replacing the outdated concept of an offensive á outrance by one aiming at the destruction of the enemy's vital vulnerability.

Otherwise, no practical consequences for the development of a Czechoslovak military doctrine were spelled out with any clarity. Nor did the reformers' plea for the formulation of an overall Warsaw Pact military doctrine and a restructuring of the alliance find an expression in specific proposals—a significant difference from the action taken by their Polish counterparts in 1956 and again ten years later. During meetings in February and March 1968, when the Soviet-proposed reform of the Warsaw Pact was successively discussed by its deputy foreign ministers in Berlin, its chiefs of staff in Prague, and finally the party chiefs convened as its political consultative committee in Sofia, the Czechoslovak representatives remained passive.38

It was again the contentious Romanians who lambasted the Soviet concept of "unified armed forces,” included in the obnoxious secret annex to the Warsaw treaty but not in its published main text. Demanding the limitation of the powers of the supreme commander and the national governments' right of veto over any deployment of foreign troops or armaments on their territories, Bucharest even tried to renege on the agreements concerning the creation of a military council, joint staff, and committee on technology, to which it had already consented in May 1966.39 At the same time, the Romanian party chief Nicolae Ceauşescu tried to derail the Warsaw Pact's accession to the nearly finished nonproliferation treaty, which he condemned as allegedly giving the superpowers license at the expense of their smaller allies. During his Prague visit in February 1968, he minced no words in privately describing the proposed document as even "worse and more dangerous than the Soviet-German treaty of 1939."41

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Although none of the other Warsaw Pact members joined Romania's efforts to derail what on balance was to prove a generally beneficial treaty, Polish Foreign Minister Rapacki and his Czechoslovak counterpart Václav David met in Prague on 29 February-1 March 1968, to discuss without Soviet supervision the possible freezing and subsequent removal of nuclear weapons from the territories of the states that had no control over them—or at least from their own countries and the two German states. The initiative was Rapacki's: Having already discussed the idea with Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel the author of the celebrated report advocating the simultaneous strengthening of NATO and its promotion of détente with its Eastern counterpart-the

Pole agreed with him to try to make the denuclearization acceptable to the Warsaw Pact. The Czechoslovaks, however, hesitated. The Prague general staff noted timorously that, even though Moscow had not yet expressed its view, the proposal was presumably disadvantageous for its alliance system and should not, in any case, be considered in Czechoslovakia's current political climate. 42

In that climate, the authors of the memorandum did not find enough support for their ideas among their superiors. At the beginning of June, they sent copies of the document to the higher authorities in the hope of contributing to the preparation of the "action program" for the development of the country's armed forces. No response came from party general secretary Alexander Dubček while his newly appointed minister of defense, Martin Dzúr, took a distinctly reserved position.43 This was not the case with Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Andrei A. Grechko, who, even before the memorandum was officially submitted to the Prague leadership, had evidently gotten wind of it, and proceeded to extract from Dzúr the promise to dismantle the academy that had produced it. And when one of the reform-minded officers, Gen. Egyd Pepich, tried to explain to the marshal that loyalty to the alliance was not in question, Grechko disrupted his presentation by noisily banging on his desk with a spoon.45

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Then followed Gen. Prchlík's July 15 interview with Prague journalists which, though not intended for publication, nevertheless became public, bringing Moscow to a rage because of his demand for the rectification of the Warsaw Pact's inequities. In a protest letter to Dubček, Warsaw Pact supreme commander Marshal Ivan I. Jakubovskii disingenuously accused Prchlík of insulting Soviet officers in addition to revealing military secrets, namely, the contents of the unpublished 1955 annex to the Warsaw treaty. Significantly, Iakubovskii's protest was received approvingly by the conservative majority of the Czechoslovak officer corps who, concerned more about their jobs than about reform, remained unreservedly loyal to the Soviet alliance. These notably included Defense Minister Dzúr, who subsequently earned Moscow's gratitude for having on his own responsibility ordered the army not to resist the Soviet invasion. For this accomplishment he was subsequently rewarded by being allowed to keep his job for another sixteen years.47

Soviet criticism of Prchlík's remarks was seconded in an anonymous "official" statement publicly disseminated by the national press agency on July 28 and secretly endorsed by the minister's military council.48 Such circumstances did not augur well for the report drafted by the general for the planned party congress and including many of the ideas of the reformist memorandum. The report went even farther in its unorthodox description of Czechoslovakia's desirable defense policy as striving "to be a policy of European security, a policy that helps ease international tensions, and a policy of friendly cooperation

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