Warsaw Treaty Organization

Assembled from 18 blocks · 1 evidence · 20 related

1. Story
2. The eastern alliance, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, signed at Warsaw on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Its timing is the point: the treaty was signed days after the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO, and it gave a legal frame to a Soviet military presence in eastern Europe that already existed. It was never a symmetrical counterpart to NATO. The unified command sat in Moscow and was held by Soviet officers throughout; national armies were equipped, doctrinally shaped and in practice directed from the centre; and the alliance's only multilateral military operation was conducted against one of its own members, when five member states invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to end the Prague Spring. Romania declined to take part in that invasion and pursued a semi-detached line thereafter; Albania stopped participating in 1961 and formally withdrew in 1968. The organisation dissolved itself in 1991, its military structures first and the treaty afterwards.
3. Knowledge
4. Warsaw Treaty Organization
5. Moscow
6. Connections
7. Moscow
8. The Warsaw Treaty is signed
9. Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia
10. The Warsaw Treaty Organization dissolves itself
11. The Soviet Union is formally dissolved
12. Warsaw Treaty Organization
13. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
14. Trans-Siberian Railway
15. Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow
16. Russian Railways abandons Moscow time across the network
17. Evidence
18. Supports the date and place of signature and the identity of the eight original parties. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; no copy of the treaty text could be retrieved in this session. The two-stage dissolution in 1991 and the sequence of Albanian and Romanian detachment are stated at low precision for the same reason.