The Cold War: A MILITARY History (12 page)

Further changes to the Warsaw Pact, which had been under discussion for some years, were implemented following the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. These included the creation of a Council of Ministers of National Defence and of a Military Council, and the reorganization of the higher staffs to include greater representation from non-Soviet countries. There was also an increase in the number of personnel exchanges between the various armed forces. Above all, however, there was evidence of a greater willingness on the part of the Soviet officers to be more co-operative with their partners in the Pact and to work together more closely. Nevertheless, and despite pressure from countries such as Romania, the most senior posts remained firmly in Soviet hands, although it could be argued that, while NATO included many non-US posts at the second-tier level, the top command posts such as SACLANT, SACEUR and Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Southern Europe (CINCSOUTH) remained equally firmly in US hands.

Although the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact armed forces used predominantly Soviet equipment, some nationally designed and developed equipment was produced. All member countries used Soviet tanks and combat aircraft, for example, but Czechoslovakia produced much of its own artillery, while Polish shipyards produced landing ships not only for Poland’s navy but for the Soviet navy as well. Soviet strategy and Soviet military doctrine remained supreme, however, which gave rise to discontent in the higher echelons of the national armies and in the national governments, who felt that they had no control over the missions likely to be undertaken by their national armies. There were periodic moves to place a non-Soviet general as
commander-in-chief
of the Pact forces, particularly when Marshal I. I. Yakubovsky died in post in 1976, but these never came to anything.

The Warsaw Pact also embraced a number of non-military organizations. Such bodies included the Technical and Scientific Committee, set up in 1969 to co-ordinate military and civil research, and the Committee of Foreign Ministers, which was established in 1976.

One significant feature which differentiated the Warsaw Pact from NATO was that at no time during the Cold War did the Soviet Union ever provide atomic or nuclear weapons to the other members of the Pact.

Despite the overwhelming power of the Soviet Union and the tight grip it imposed on its ‘satellites’, the Warsaw Pact suffered from repeated internal problems. Also, unlike NATO, the military forces of the Pact were used on at least one occasion to bring recalcitrant members back into line.

HUNGARY: 1956

There were riots in East Berlin in June 1953 and in Poznán, Poland, in June 1956, both of which were put down by direct intervention by Soviet troops. These were, however, fairly localized affairs, but the Hungarian revolt in 1956 was a nationwide event, and its brutal repression by the Soviet Union was a turning point for both the Soviet Union and NATO.

Hungary had fought on the German side in the Second World War and was overrun by the Soviet army in 1944. Elections then established a coalition government, but with a substantial Communist minority. The Hungarian Communists then followed a similar pattern to that of their ‘socialist comrades’ in the other satellites and steadily removed their opponents until they won the next elections in 1949, principally because there were no other candidates. The Communists, headed by Secretary-General Mátyás Rákosi, then implemented the usual policies of collectivization of farms and rapid expansion of industry, thus sowing the seeds for their ultimate defeat.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953 Rákosi was instructed by the Soviet leadership to install Imre Nagy as prime minister, but after a short period in office Nagy suffered a heart attack in 1955 and had to be replaced.

The situation in Hungary deteriorated rapidly in early 1956, largely due to a general feeling of discontent with Communist rule, to which there were four contributory factors. First, there was a widespread feeling that the leadership itself was irresolute and uncertain as to the way forward, and Hungarian dissidents had taken heart from a visit by Soviet leaders to Yugoslavia in June 1955, which appeared to accord an air of respectability to Tito’s form of nationalist Communism, independent of Soviet control, and from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiative in January 1956. Second, due
to
the ineptitude so frequently displayed by Communist regimes, the economy was manifestly failing. Third, Soviet armed suppression of the Polish revolt in Pozna
ń
encouraged Rákosi to take even more repressive measures in Hungary, but a visit to Budapest by Soviet Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan in July 1956 resulted in a shake-up of the government, with the deeply hated Rákosi being dismissed and replaced by Erno Gero. Finally, even further encouragement to the dissidents came in October 1956, when widespread unrest in Poland resulted in a relatively popular figure, Władysław Gomułka, being released from jail (he had been found guilty of ‘Titoism’) and appointed as first secretary.

This was taken as a signal that a national form of Communism would be acceptable to the Soviet leadership, and a student rally in Budapest on 22 October produced a fourteen-point manifesto demanding a similar system for Hungary. Next day a rally in support of the Poles started peacefully but got out of hand in the evening when an aggressive speech on the radio by Rákosi led to a confrontation between the crowd and the AVH (state security police), who eventually shot into the crowd.

Revolutionary councils immediately sprang up all over the country, advocating three policies: nationalism, neutrality and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Soviet leadership, which regarded Hungary as an essential element of its defensive strategy, was alarmed, while the Hungarian Politburo tried to cover all eventualities by calling for Soviet troops and also reappointing the ailing Nagy as prime minister, even though he was opposed to Soviet intervention. When the Soviet tanks began to roll into Budapest in the early hours of 24 October they only made matters much worse, and a number were quickly destroyed by petrol bombs. Two representatives of the Soviet Politburo, Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, visited Budapest on 24–26 October and swept the Communist old guard aside, confirming Nagy’s appointment and replacing Gero by János Kádár. Nagy announced his new government on 27 October, the Soviet tanks left on 29 October, and Mikoyan and Suslov returned to Budapest on the 30th to announce that Hungarian sovereignty would be respected.

This Soviet activity was in reality an elaborate camouflage, however, and military forces were massing for the invasion. But at this point external events intervened. On 29 October the Israelis attacked Egypt, and the British and French governments issued an ultimatum to the two sides to withdraw from the Suez Canal and sent an amphibious task force from Cyprus and Malta (30 October). This diverted world attention from events in Hungary, and the Soviet army used some 250,000 troops and 2,500 armoured vehicles to surround Budapest on 1 November. After apparently granting concessions (whose only purpose was to give its troops time to ‘shake out’ into battle order), the Soviet Union struck at midnight on 3/4 November.

Budapest then became a violent and bloody battlefield as Hungarian freedom fighters tried to destroy the Soviet tanks and to kill or demoralize the Soviet troops. But, despite showing great courage and exhibiting considerable ingenuity in their methods of attack, the Hungarians were slowly but inexorably beaten by the organized might of the Soviet army. The main fighting was over by 14 November, and all resistance had crumbled by 30 November. About 25,000 Hungarians and 7,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed in the fighting, but the result was a foregone conclusion.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1968

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 exhibited precisely what was meant by the new Brezhnev doctrine of ‘Socialist Commonwealth’. In the aftermath of the Second World War the Czechoslovak people as a whole were grateful to the Soviet army for their liberation from German occupation, while many still retained bitter memories of being ‘sold down the river’ by Britain and France in the Munich Agreement of 1938. As a result, the long-established Communist Party did well in the 1946 elections and took part in the subsequent coalition, providing the prime minister and the minister of police. Unlike in most other countries of eastern Europe, the Soviet army did not retain any troops in Czechoslovakia once the Germans had been defeated.

The Communists gradually expanded their influence, and from February 1948 they provided an uninspiring and inefficient government for some twenty years, but growing popular unrest resulted in the appointment in January 1968 of Alexander Dub
č
ek as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

Dub
č
ek promised reforms, especially of the political and education systems, and this, coupled with the suspension of censorship and a rapidly increasing Western influence, resulted in a euphoric period known as the ‘Prague Spring’. These developments were, however, viewed with considerable disfavour by the other Eastern-bloc leaders, particularly those in East Germany and the USSR, who saw the events in Czechoslovakia not only as a major strategic threat to the Warsaw Pact, but also, if the freedom virus were to prove infectious, as a challenge to their own positions. The only exception was Romania, which not only gave vocal support for the ‘Czechoslovak experiment’ and resolutely declined to become involved in any concerted action, but also signed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with Czechoslovakia in the week preceding the eventual invasion.

The Soviet leaders, instead of going it alone, as they had done in Hungary, made extensive use of the Warsaw Pact consultative machinery, initially in an endeavour to find a non-violent solution. Thus a Pact meeting in Warsaw
in
June resulted in a formal letter of warning being sent to the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party. This was followed by a meeting between the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party and the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in late July, and the crisis then appeared to have been defused.

Meanwhile, however, the Soviets had also been using the Pact machinery to plan co-ordinated military action, in which East German, Hungarian, Polish and Soviet units would all take part. Several major Warsaw Pact exercises were held in the summer of 1968 – far more than had been the case in the previous few years, which should have been seen as a classic signal of an imminent invasion. In any invasion, the major problems for commanders and their staffs are command-and-control, telecommunications and logistics, together with transport, movement control and supplies. The first overt exercise, called
Böhmerwald
, involving Soviet, Czech, East German and Polish troops, was a command-post and telecommunications exercise which took place from 20 to 30 June in Czechoslovakia and was a none too subtle warning to the Czechoslovak leadership. More ominous, however, was the major logistics exercise (
Nyemen
) held between 23 July and 10 August. This included calling up reservists in the four western Soviet republics, and led immediately into another command-post, telecommunications and air-defence exercise (‘
Skyshield
’) between 11 and 20 August. This was clearly meant to cover the assembly and ‘shaking out’ of the Soviet, East German and Polish troops taking part in the invasion, since it led straight into the invasion itself on the night of 20 August, which was a Sunday and traditionally the time of least resistance to military force.

Just after 2300 on 20 August a Soviet
spetsnaz
(special forces) battalion landed at Prague Airport and took it over with great speed. This was closely followed by 103 Guards Airborne Division, which flew in and then raced into the city to take over the vital points. Meanwhile the ground troops rolled over the border: