Mutual Defense Organization: The Warsaw Pact

Warsaw Pact

In May 1955 the Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites signed a treaty that was the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact was a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. This pact was named Warsaw because it was signed in Warsaw. Members were the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.The Warsaw pact was made to protect every member in the pact. It was called on the members that if any member was attacked by an outside force the other members would come to the defence and set up a unified military command.

Chief in Command would be Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. On May, 1955 the United States and the other members if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization made the decision to make West Germany a member of NATO and let them remilitarize. The Soviet Union saw this action as a direct threat and created the Warsaw Pact. The Pact remained until 1991, it fell apart after each member left.

The first to go was Albania because they turned to China for aid and trade, then East Germany left and reunited with West Germany and became apart of NATO. Then the military alliance of the pact was gone by March

The Warsaw Pact was, however, the first step in a more systematic plan to strengthen the Soviet hold over its satellites, a program undertaken by the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolay Bulganin after their assumption of power early in 1955. The treaty also served as a lever to enhance the bargaining position of the Soviet Union in international diplomacy, an inference that may be drawn by the concluding article of the treaty, which stipulated that the Warsaw agreement would lapse when a general East-West collective-security pact should come into