The Warsaw Pact was the treaty setting up the Soviet-dominated opposition grouping to NATO, signed in 1955, and theoretically initiated as a response to West Germany joining NATO in the same year. The military structure was known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Its membership included most of the Soviet bloc, though Albania, which had come more and more under Chinese influence, ceased to participate in 1961 and formally left in 1968, and both Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to leave, unsuccessfully, at the times of their anti-Soviet risings in 1956 and 1968 respectively. The Warsaw Pact set up a unified military command structure under the control of Moscow, and was largely armed by the Soviet Union. In practice it was nothing more than an extension of the Soviet military forces, whereby the Eastern European countries provided perhaps 20 of the 70 or more divisions stationed in non-Soviet Eastern Europe.
Towards the end of its history (it was formally abolished in July 1991, but had effectively ceased to function after the beginning of the Eastern European revolutions in 1989) many doubts existed among Western defence analysts about the reliability of the armies of most members of the Pact. Furthermore, as the Soviet Union made a practice of always equipping these forces with less-modern weapons systems, they would have been largely ineffective even if politically reliable. The only time the Pact actually engaged in military operations was the crushing of the Czech uprising in 1968. Even this, however, was mainly a propaganda exercise to demonstrate a spurious East European solidarity, with the real offensive entirely carried out by troops from the Soviet Union. No non-Soviet member had any access to nuclear weapons, and the only seriously effective other member was believed to be the quite small East German army. Western analysts believed the Soviet Union’s real interest in the Pact was, in fact, to help control its satellites and, particularly in the early days, to protect against any renewed threat from Germany, which the Soviet regimes never ceased to fear.
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