Douglas Selvage submitted his dissertation, “Poland, the German Democratic Republic and the German Question, 1955-1967," at Yale University received his Ph.D. in December 1998.

'The author would like to thank Hope Harrison for her advice and support during his research in the Polish and East German archives. Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the US Department of State, which administers the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research Program (Title VIII).

2 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 149; Vladislav M. Zubok, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis (1958-1962), Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Working Paper No. 6, (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 1993), p. 22; Hope Millard Harrison, "The Bargaining Power of Weaker Allies in Bipolarity and Crisis: The Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-61,” Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1993, pp. 239-40 and fn #625.

3 Hope M. Harrison, Ulbricht and the Concrete 'Rose': New Archival Evidence on the Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-61, CWIHP Working Paper No. 5, (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 1993), p. 55.

* See Douglas Selvage, "Khrushchev's Berlin Ultimatum: New Evidence from the Polish Archives," in this issue of the Bulletin.

5

› Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose,' pp. 28-9. ❝ Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 190-94, 197.

1 Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete Rose,' p. 16.

8 Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose,' pp. 28-30. On the inter-German trade agreement, see Robert W. Dean, West German Trade with the East: The Political Dimension (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), pp. 56-9; Ann Tusa, The Last Division: A History of Berlin, 1945-1989 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997),

pp. 219-20.

9 "Maßnahmen zu den Analysen über den Warenaustausch mit den volksdemokratischen Ländern: Anlage Nr. 1 zum Protokoll Nr. 37 vom 25.7.61," Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der ehemaligen DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO BA), Berlin, J IV 2/2-778, pp. 26-7.

10 "Protokoll Nr. 48/61 der Sitzung des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees," 12 September 1961, SAPMO BA, J IV 2/2-790, p. 7.

11 Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose,' pp. 45-6. 12 Ibid., p. 47.

13 "Stenogram IX plenarnego posiedzenia Komitetu Centralnego Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej,” 22 November 1961. Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), KC PZPR, sygn. 1240, p. 408.

14 See Harrison, Ulbricht and the 'Concrete Rose, ' p. 48. 15 U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-63, vol. XIV, pp. 267-68. In the end there was no embargo because the Soviets and East Germans did not block off access to West Berlin, and the other NATO allies opposed such a

measure. See the “Memorandum of Conversation,” 15 September 1961, in ibid., p. 412.

"Notatka z zapisu spotkania przywódców partii panstw obozu socjalistycznego w Moskwie,” in Jan Ptasinski, “Moje rozmowy z Wladyslawem Gomulka w latach 1960-1970,” 1992, cz. II. Instytut Dokumentacji Historycznej Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej (IDH-PRL), P II/7b, k. 194, pp. 514; Zubok, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, pp. 19-25. I have based my account of the Moscow meeting on notes that the Polish ambassador to Moscow from 1968-70, Jan Ptasinski, allegedly made from a transcript of the meeting that he found in the safe of the Polish embassy in Moscow. Ptasinski's notes compare favorably to the Soviet transcript cited by Vladislav Zubok in his work, and I have found Ptasinski's papers to be reliable in other instances by comparing them with documents in the former Central Committee Archives, now part of Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive for Contemporary Documents) in Warsaw. IDH-PRL was set up as a private foundation by Polish scholars in the early 1990's to collect documentation and interviews from former communist officials who did not want to contribute their papers to the state archives. 17 Ibid.

18 "Protokoll Nr. 48/61 der Sitzung des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees,” 12 September 1961. SAPMO BA, J IV 2/2p. 7.

790,

19 Robert M. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961: SovietAmerican Relations and the Struggle for Power in the Kremlin, June - November 1961 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 358-60.

20 Letter, Ulbricht to Gomulka, 23 September 1961. AAN, KC PZPR, p. 110, t. 15.

21 Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961, p. 346.

22 "Memorandum of Conversation," 30 September 1961 (talks between Gromyko and Rusk), in "Conference Files, 1949-1963," Box 262, File "CF 1957, 16th United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 1961, Memcons." Record Group [RG] 59, National Archives II, College Park, MD [NA]. Also see: "Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in France," 28 Septmber 1961, in FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XIV, pp. 439-41; and "Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in France," 2 October 1961, in ibid., pp. 456-460. On Bonn's opposition to discussion of matters relating to “European security" in the context of a Berlin settlement, see the attachment

MASTNY NAMED SENIOR RESEARCH SCHOLAR

CWIHP is pleased to announce the recent appointment of Dr. Vojtech Mastny as a "Senior Research Scholar" at the Cold War International History Project. Following his award-winning book on "The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years," Dr. Mastny is currently working on a parallel history of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Concurrently he is heading a larger documentation project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, jointly sponsored by CWIHP, the National Security Archive at The George Washington University, and the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich).

to the State Department's briefing book for Adenauer's visit to Washington from 20-22 November 1961, entitled, “Position Paper: Arms Control in Relation to Berlin," 17 November 1961, "Conference Files, 1949-1963," Box 269, File "CF 1993— Adenauer Visit, Washington, 11/20-22/61, RG59, NA.

23 "Memorandum: Four Power Declaration," in the briefing book, “Adenauer Visit: Washington, D.C., November 20-22, 1961," "Conference Files, 1949-1963," Box 269, Files "CF 1993-Adenauer Visit, Washington, 11/20-22/61,” RG59, NA. 24 "Memorandum of Conversation" (Kennedy-Adenauer Meeting), 22 November 1961, in FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. XIV, 62027. Also see Letter, Kennedy to Prime Minister Macmillan, 22 Novermber 1961, in ibid., pp. 632-634.

25 Ibid., “Quadripartite Foreign Ministers Meeting, Paris, 1012 December, 1961," File "Berlin Crisis-DOS FOIAS," National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.

26 On curtailing Ulbricht's influence, see Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose,' p. 55. On China's possible role, see Zubok, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, pp. 24-5.

27 Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose,' p. 55. 28 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, p. 249.

29 See, e.g., Erwin Weit, Ostblock intern: 13 Jahre Dolmetscher für die polnische Partei- und Staatsführung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1970), pp. 45-6.

30 COMECOM is the acronym for "Committee for Mutual Economic Assistance."-on Khrushchev's Comecon reform proposals and Gomulka's “triangle," see "Relacja Wladyslawa Tykocinskiego: zdradzone tajemnice," Na antenie 41 (21 August 1966), I; Henryk Rózanski, Spojrzenie na RWPG: Wspomnienia, dokumenty, refleksje 1949-1988 (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1990); Jan Ptasinski, Drugi zwrot: Gomulka w szczytu powodzenia (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1988), pp. 169-72; Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Das 'nördliche Dreieck': Die Beziehungen zwischen der DDR, der Tschechoslowakei und Polen in den Jahren 1954 bis 1962 (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1994), pp. 305-6, 344-46. For the latest on the New Economic System, see Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

31 See the letter from Walter Ulbricht to Hans Rodenberg, 23 October 1971, reprinted in Peter Przybylski, Tatort Politbüro, Vol. II (Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 1991), pp. 351-52. Ulbricht wrote: "When Khrushchev came to the GDR, he criticized me all the way to Magdeburg because I was not a sufficiently obedient corn boy [Mais-Jünger]."

32 L. Cieslik, Moscow, "Notatka z rozmowy z A. Adzubem," 7 May 1962. AAN, KC PZPR, p. 116, t. 40.

33 Adzhubei claimed in the course of several conversations in Germany that Ulbricht would not live much longer; he had cancer. Adzhubei's statement, Ulbricht later wrote to Hans Rodenberg, "had not improved" his relations with Khrushchev. On Adzhubei's visit to West Germany, see Daniel Kosthorst, "Sowjetische Geheimpolitik in Deutschland? Chruschtschow und die Adschubej-Mission 1964," Vierteljahrshefte zur Zeitgeschichte 44 (1996), pp. 257-293.

34 From this point forth in the document, Rusk's name was rendered as "Rask."

35 Spaak visited Moscow on September 19. Khrushchev apparently suggested that he had never “placed a deadline on Western acceptance of Soviet demands for a German peace treaty and free-city status for West Berlin." Slusser, The Berlin Crisis

of 1961, pp. 229-30.

36 In February 1962, the Soviets "demanded exclusive use of the air corridors, ... buzzed allied aircraft and dropped metallic chaff to interfere with Western radar and air traffic control." Tusa, The Last Division, p. 347.

37 Although it is unclear to which interview Khrushchev was referring, Kennedy did write to Khrushchev through a confidential channel on 16 October 1961: "This area [Berlin] would also be rendered less peaceful if the maintenance of the West's vital interests were to become dependent on the whims of the East German regime. Some of Mr. Ulbricht's statements on this subject have not been consistent with your reassurances or even his own and I do not believe that either of us wants a constant state of doubt, tension and emergency in this area, which would require an even larger military build-up on both sides." Letter from President Kennedy

to Chairman Khrushchev, Hyannis Port, 16 October 1961, U.S. Department of State, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-63, Volume VI: Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 41. 38 On Chinese criticism of Khrushchev's failure to conclude a peace treaty, see Harrison, Ulbricht and his Concrete 'Rose, p. 53.

39 Although the archives of the former East German Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten) remain in Berlin, they are now part of the FRG's Foreign Office Archives.

40 Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

41

Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD/KGB and heir-apparent to Stalin, executed in 1953. After his arrest in late June 1953, Beria was accused of having been willing to give up the socialist GDR in favor of a neutral, reunified, bourgeois, and demilitarized Germany in return for substantial reparations from the FRG. Khrushchev and his other rivals in the Soviet leadership had justified his arrest and execution in part on these grounds. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 136.

42 Both Suslov and Il'ichev were CPSU CC secretaries with responsibilities in the fields of ideology and propaganda.

By Vojtech Mastny

T

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.'

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

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.

14

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. 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.'5

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.

****

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 Malita 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