The Warsaw Pact (WP),[d] formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA),[e] was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War.

[6][7][8][9][10][11] Dominated by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Western Bloc.

The pact began to unravel with the spread of the Revolutions of 1989 through the Eastern Bloc, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland,[14] its electoral success in June 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989.

On 25 February 1991, at a meeting in Hungary, the pact ceased to exist via joint declaration by the defense and foreign ministers of the six remaining member states.

[6][7][17][18][19] As the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states by 1955, the pact has been long considered "superfluous",[20] and because of the rushed way in which it was conceived, NATO officials labeled it a "cardboard castle".

[28] Proposals for the reunification of Germany were nothing new: earlier on 20 March 1952, talks about a German reunification, initiated by the so-called 'Stalin Note', ended after the United Kingdom, France, and the United States insisted that a unified Germany should not be neutral and should be free to join the European Defence Community (EDC) and rearm.

James Dunn (US), who met in Paris with Eden, Konrad Adenauer (West Germany), and Robert Schuman (France), affirmed that "the object should be to avoid discussion with the Russians and to press on the European Defense Community".

[34] One month later, the proposed European Treaty was rejected not only by supporters of the EDC, but also by Western opponents of the European Defence Community (like French Gaullist leader Gaston Palewski) who perceived it as "unacceptable in its present form because it excludes the USA from participation in the collective security system in Europe".

The incorporation of West Germany into the organization on 9 May 1955 was described as "a decisive turning point in the history of our continent" by Halvard Lange, Foreign Affairs Minister of Norway at the time.

[45] In November 1954, the USSR requested a new European Security Treaty,[46] in order to make a final attempt to not have a remilitarized West Germany potentially opposed to the Soviet Union, with no success.

Historian Mark Kramer concludes: "The net outflow of resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan.

"[49] In November 1956, Soviet forces invaded Hungary, a Warsaw Pact member state, and violently put down the Hungarian Revolution.

[65] For 36 years, NATO and the Warsaw Pact never directly waged war against each other in Europe; the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies implemented strategic policies aimed at the containment of each other in Europe, while working and fighting for influence within the wider Cold War on the international stage.

[73] In 1989, popular civil and political public discontent toppled the Communist governments of the Warsaw Treaty countries.

The event, which goes back to an idea by Otto von Habsburg, caused the mass exodus of GDR citizens and the media-informed population of Eastern Europe felt the loss of power of their rulers and the Iron Curtain broke down completely.

[75][76][77] Independent national politics made feasible with the perestroika and liberal glasnost policies revealed shortcomings and failures (i.e. of the soviet-type economic planning model) and induced institutional collapse of the Communist government in the USSR in 1991.

[78][better source needed] From 1989 to 1991, Communist governments were overthrown in Albania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

In the early 1960s, Grechko initiated programs meant to preempt Romanian doctrinal heresies from spreading to other Pact members.

After 1964, the Soviet Army was barred from returning to Romania, as the country refused to take part in joint Pact exercises.

[87] Even before the advent of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania was in fact an independent country, as opposed to the rest of the Warsaw Pact.

[1] The Romanian regime was largely impervious to Soviet political influence, and Ceaușescu was the only declared opponent of glasnost and perestroika.

[96] Romania was the only non-Soviet Warsaw Pact member which was not obliged to militarily defend the Soviet Union in case of an armed attack.

For instance, when Romania became the only Eastern European country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, some historians have speculated that this was at Moscow's whim.

[111] The strategy behind the formation of the Warsaw Pact was driven by the desire of the Soviet Union to prevent Central and Eastern Europe being used as a base for its enemies.

Ideologically, the Soviet Union arrogated the right to define socialism and communism and act as the leader of the global socialist movement.

A corollary to this was the necessity of military intervention if a country appeared to be "violating" core socialist ideas, i.e. breaking away from the Soviet sphere of influence, explicitly stated in the Brezhnev Doctrine.