The Cold War: A MILITARY History (13 page)

The whole operation consisted of three phases. In the first, some twenty Warsaw Pact divisions totalling some 250,000 men, complete with their associated weapons and supplies, invaded Czechoslovakia from north, south and east, occupying all places of any strategic significance. The second phase, concurrent with the first, involved the movement of ten Soviet divisions from the western Soviet military districts into the positions in East Germany and Poland vacated by the Soviet divisions that had invaded Czechoslovakia. In the third phase, many of the divisions that had invaded Czechoslovakia in the first phase redeployed to the western end of the country, facing the border with the Federal Republic of Germany, in an area previously occupied by Czechoslovak divisions. The net result was that the Soviet Union had not only restored its control over Czechoslovakia, but had also greatly strengthened its front line against NATO. From a purely military perspective, it was a masterly manoeuvre.

The Czechoslovak people and their national army were completely defeated by this use of overpowering force. The Czech population was united in its opposition to such use of force, but there was no armed resistance, as there had been in Hungary, and
force majeure
triumphed once again. The Czechs were deeply embittered by the experience. They felt badly let down by the West, as they had done after the Munich Agreement. They also felt let down by the Hungarians and Poles, whom they had considered to be fellow sufferers under the Soviet yoke. But most of all they deeply resented the return of Germans in uniform after the bitter years of occupation between 1938 and 1945.

One curious feature of the invasion of Czechoslovakia was that, although it involved numerous non-Soviet formations and clearly used the Warsaw Pact co-ordinating machinery, it was actually commanded by the commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces and not by the commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact.

THE POLISH CRISIS: 1980–81

Poland has been fought over and partitioned on numerous occasions during the past two centuries, but in the aftermath of the Second World War it took on a new role as the supply route between the USSR and Soviet forces confronting NATO across the Inner German Border. Despite the presence of a Soviet garrison numbering some 40,000, it proved to be a troublesome ally, due in part to historical factors, the most recent being the Red Army drive on Warsaw in 1920, the partitioning of Polish territory with Nazi Germany in 1939, and the murder of some 15,000 of Poland’s political and military elite in the Katyn Forest in 1940.

The first major unrest came in June 1956. It started with factory workers in Pozna
ń
protesting about low pay and standards of living, but then, like the Berlin uprising in 1953, turned into a more general protest against the Communist government. A Soviet delegation, headed by Nikolai Bulganin, arrived in Warsaw in July, but the Polish leaders stood up to them and matters simmered until October, when disagreements within the upper echelons of the Polish Communist Party resulted in a visit by another Soviet delegation, this time headed by First Secretary Khrushchev, on 19 October. The Polish Communist leader, Gomułka, warned the Soviets of the dire consequences of military intervention, and, following Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, a meeting of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party resulted in the defeat of the anti-reform group, elected Gomułka as first secretary, and dropped Marshal Rokossovsky from the Politburo.
^fn5
Faced with strong support for the new regime from the mass of the Polish people and in the absence of any suggestion that Poland should abandon the Warsaw Pact or evict the Soviet army garrison, Khrushchev telephoned Gomułka to inform him that the USSR had no further objections to his limited reforms.

There was more trouble in December 1970, when shipyard workers in Gda
ń
sk rioted. This time it was Gomułka who was ousted, being replaced by Edward Gierek, who once again tried to resolve the workers’ grievances. There was further trouble in 1976, when food prices were increased, but after several riots the government backed down and the prices returned to their previous level, while Gierek negotiated a large Soviet loan to enable him to meet some of the workers’ demands.

In July 1980 the government once again raised meat prices and, as before, this quickly led to riots, which started on this occasion at a tractor factory in Warsaw. Unrest spread quickly, and in August 50,000 workers came out on
strike
, including those at the Gda
ń
sk shipyard. By now the demands had increased to include political and trade union reform, and the agreement reached between the government and the Gda
ń
sk shipworkers included the right to form non-Communist trade unions, resulting in the official establishment of the ‘Solidarity’ union. Gierek was replaced by Stanisław Kania as the crisis deepened, but the new man seemed equally unable to find a solution, and the civil disturbances increased.

Kania was visited by no less than three separate delegations of senior Soviet officials between January and March 1981, and the tempo of Warsaw Pact exercises increased, all of which bore a disturbing resemblance to events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. So, too, did the next development: a letter from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in mid-September, which drew Kania’s attention to the widespread Polish criticism of the USSR and its soldiers, and expressed an earnest hope that the Polish leadership would take resolute steps to stop this.

By October Soviet patience was beginning to run out, and on 28 October 1981 the minister of national defence, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was appointed first secretary of the Polish United Workers Party – the only soldier ever to be appointed to such a post in any east-European Communist party. Jaruzelski first banned all strikes for a period of ninety days and then on 13 December imposed martial law under the control of a newly created ‘Military Council’. The crisis was now effectively over – at least for the time being.

Throughout these events the threat of a repeat of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia hung over the country, and Marshal V. G. Kulikov, the Pact’s commander-in-chief, was a frequent visitor to Poland. He called on First Secretary Kania in February 1981 and on the new first secretary, General Jaruzelski, once just before the ban on strikes was imposed in November and again on the day that the martial-law decree was issued in December.

As during the earlier Czechoslovak crisis, the number of Warsaw Pact exercises had increased, with no less than fourteen being held between September 1980 and December 1981, when the crisis ended. One of the largest was a major command and staff exercise lasting from 17 March to 7 April 1981; designated
Soyuz-81
, this involved Czechoslovak, East German and Polish troops, including a large number of reservists from all participating countries. A similar exercise, designated
Zapad-81
, followed in September.

There can be no doubt that planning for an invasion went much further than just staff preparations. Western intelligence detected major troop concentrations around the Polish borders in early December and expected the actual operation to begin on 8 December. One piece of evidence was the use of a huge building at Prora on the Baltic island of Rügen as a transit camp
for
several thousand East German troops assembling for the operation (although they returned to their peacetime locations once the operation had been cancelled).
¹
Erich Honecker, the East German leader, wrote to Soviet first secretary Brezhnev on 26 November, strongly urging him to press for Warsaw Pact intervention at the forthcoming Pact meeting on 5 December. Numerous Western leaders urged Brezhnev not to do so, however, and this, coupled with the firm measures being imposed by General Jaruzelski, appears to have had an effect, since when the leaders met in Moscow they decided not to invade.
²

The armies of the ‘southern tier’ of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania) did not take part in any of these activities and were not included in the plans to invade Poland.

General Jaruzelski has consistently declined to give any details of events during this period, but there can be little doubt that Poland would have been invaded either by the Warsaw Pact or by Soviet forces alone had he not taken over and pacified his country. Poland was vital to Soviet strategic plans in a way that neither Czechoslovakia or Hungary had been, since all the supply routes to East Germany ran through the country.
^fn6
Further, such an invasion would have been strenuously resisted not only by the Polish people, but also, in all probability, by large elements, if not the entirety, of the Polish army. Such resistance would have been even more violent had troops from the GDR joined their ‘class comrades’ of the Soviet army, and it is just possible that the West might have been dragged in, although it was physically separated from Poland by East Germany. The alternatives to Jaruzelski were therefore extremely dire, and it may well be that he actually saved his country from a bloody fate and was not the villain he has been made out to be.

THE FIRST MAVERICK – ALBANIA

Albania, with a population of some 3 million and the poorest country in Europe, was the smallest state to join the Warsaw Pact. Following a civil war in 1944 the Communists, headed by Enver Hoxha, seized power and established a ‘people’s republic’ in January 1946. The regime was initially friendly with Yugoslavia, but when Stalin and Tito split in 1948 Hoxha aligned with the Soviet Union, and in return he received considerable economic and military assistance. Albania was one of the founder members of the Warsaw
Pact
, although one of its few major contributions was to provide the Soviet navy with a base on the island of Sazan (Saseno) in the Gulf of Vlorës, in return for which the Soviet Union cancelled Albania’s considerable debt, made large credits available, and also supplied much military and naval equipment, including two submarines and a variety of surface vessels.

Hoxha was a strict Stalinist and reacted very strongly to Khrushchev’s denunciation of the former Soviet dictator in a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. As relations cooled, the Soviet and other east-European governments reduced Albania’s line of credit, making its finances still worse, and Hoxha developed relations with the only other ‘Stalinist’ power: Communist China. China’s relations with the Soviet Union also worsened, and the Soviet leaders started to condemn China’s new friend, Albania, as a means of disguising their real target: China itself. As a result, in December 1961 Albania severed all relations with the USSR and left the Warsaw Pact. The Albanians also seized all Soviet facilities in the country, including the naval base on Sazan, where their haul included two Soviet submarines which happened to be in port.

Thereafter, Albania remained a maverick. It maintained close relations with China for some years until the Chinese cut off their aid in 1978, after which Albania carried on alone. In effect, however, its only role of even marginal significance in the Cold War was its relatively brief membership of the Warsaw Pact and its provision of berthing facilities to the Soviet navy within the confines of the Mediterranean.

THE SECOND MAVERICK – ROMANIA

During the Second World War Romania provided two armies which fought alongside their German allies on the Eastern Front, losing some 173,000 troops in the battle of Stalingrad. By 1944 national support for the war had waned, and in early 1944 King Michael deposed the dictator General Ion Antonescu and surrendered unconditionally to the advancing Soviet armies. On 30 December 1947, however, the king was compelled to abdicate and Romania became a ‘people’s republic’, and in 1948 Georghe Georghiu-Dej, a long-time Communist, was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party at Moscow’s insistence.

Georghiu-Dej controlled Romania until 1965 and originally supported the Soviet line, especially over the Soviet army’s quelling of the Poznán riots and the Hungarian uprising. Such support played a key role in the Soviet decision to withdraw its troops from Romania in 1958, but it now appears that Georghiu-Dej was playing a double game. In 1963 the Romanian ambassador to the United Nations held a meeting with US secretary of state Dean Rusk in which the Romanian referred to the recent Cuban Missile
Crisis
and explained that his country had opposed the Soviet moves and would never support the USSR in wars outside the immediate area of the Warsaw Pact. In return for a promise of this, he asked for, and was later given, an assurance that the USA would not target missiles on Romania.
³

Nikolae Ceau
ş
escu was carefully groomed to succeed Georghiu-Dej, and took over as first secretary (later changed to general secretary) in 1965. He adopted an increasingly nationalist position, and his relationship with the Warsaw Pact was ambivalent, to say the least.

Ceau
ş
escu openly opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia and flatly refused to allow Romanian troops to take part; indeed, he even ordered a limited mobilization to protect his country’s northern border with the USSR. Following this, in 1972 at Ceau
ş
escu’s behest the National Assembly passed a law which banned military operations outside Romania’s borders, leading to a national strategy in which regular troops would fight delaying actions in border regions, buying time for a
levée en masse
, following which the invader would be faced with a prospect of a people’s war.

On the other hand, the Romanian armed forces maintained a large contingent at the Warsaw Pact Joint Headquarters in Moscow, and a Soviet staff remained at the Romanian Defence Ministry throughout the Cold War. Romania also remained on the Warsaw Pact’s infrastructure committees and commissions. Other contradictions included Romania’s refusal to permit any Warsaw Pact troop deployments on its territory,
^fn7
while allowing its air force to be integrated into the Warsaw Pact air defence system.