Encyclopedia of Russian History

In addition to its external defensive role against NATO, the Warsaw Pact served to maintain cohesion in the Soviet bloc. It was used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and again to prepare for an invasion of Poland in 1980 or 1981 if the Polish regime failed to suppress the Solidarity movement. The Warsaw Pact was also an instrument of Soviet policy in the Third World. In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union relied on several non-Soviet WTO members to assist client states in Africa and the Middle East.

The alliance began to unravel with the introduction of Mkhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union, and his attendant redefinition of Soviet-East European relations. Though the alliance was renewed in 1985, as required by the treaty, deteriorating economic conditions and the rising national aspirations in Eastern Europe put its future in question. The Soviet military attempted to adjust to the shifting political landscape. In 1987 the WTO modified its doctrine to emphasize its defensive character, but this and other proposed changes proved insufficient to arrest the decomposition of the alliance. The key development that

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hastened the WTO’s demise was the unification of Germany, which constituted an irreparable breach in the Pact’s security perimeter. Under pressure from Eastern Europe, the decision to abolish the military structures of the Pact was taken at a Political Consultative Committee meeting in Budapest in late February 1991; the remaining political structures were formally abolished on July 1, 1991.

The overall value of the Warsaw Pact to the Soviet Union during the Cold War remains a point of debate. Clearly, the organization legitimized the continued Soviet garrisoning of Eastern Europe and provided additional layers of political and military control. In addition, the potential contributions of the East European armed forces to Soviet military strategy, as well as the use of the members’ territory, were significant assets. On the other hand, throughout the Warsaw Pact’s existence, the ultimate reliability and cohesion of its non-Soviet members in a putative war against NATO remained in question. In addition, the declining ability of the East Europeans to contribute to equipment modernization, especially as their economies deteriorated in the late 1970s and 1980s, raised doubts about the overall quality of the WTO armed forces. See also: COMMUNIST BLOC; NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herspring, Dale R. (1998). Requiem for an Army: The Demise of the East German Military. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Johnson, A. Ross; Dean, Robert W.; and Alexiev, Alexander. (1982). East European Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern Tier. New York: Crane Russak. Jones, Christopher D. (1981). Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact. New York: Praeger Publishers. Michta, Andrew A. (1990). Red Eagle: The Army in Polish Politics, 1944-1988. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Nelson, Daniel N. (1986). Alliance Behavior in the Warsaw Pact. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. (2003). «http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/index .htm». Volgyes, Ivan. (1982). The Political Reliability of the Warsaw Pact Armies: The Southern Tier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

ANDREW A. MICHTA

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

WESTERNIZERS

WESTERNIZERS

The word Westernizers appeared in Russia at the turn of the eighteenth century as the antonym to Easternizers and was used to denote Russian religious figures who minimized the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Easternizers interpreted the term West as “sunset,” “decline”; hence for them Westernizers embodied decline and darkness. In the 1840s, in the course of a heated discussion held in the Russian press as well as in St. Petersburg and Moscow literary salons, Russian thinkers discussed the specific character of Russian culture, the interrelation of Russia and Europe, and the further development of Russia-either with Europe or along its own special path. Those who advocated rapprochement between Russia and Western Europe and adoption of the European way of life were called Westernizers. Those who defended a nativist course for Russia’s development were called Slavophiles. These terms born in polemics were widely used in the press, literature, and everyday language of the intelligentsia. They were used for the division of people into allies and opponents. They were also used to mobilize the public under one banner or the other. After the 1860s, the term Westernizers was applied to the representatives of a variety of ideological trends whose pedigree could be traced to the Westernizers of the 1840s.