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Introduction
A Cardboard Castle? is the first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable as outsiders often believed, nor were its strengths and weaknesses the same at different times in its surprisingly long history, extending for almost half a century. |
The lengthy introductory study by Vojtech Mastny, an award-winning historian and leading expert on the Warsaw Pact, assesses the controversial origins of the “superfluous” alliance, its subsequent search for a purpose, its crisis and consolidation despite congenital weaknesses, as well as its unexpected and largely unwanted demise - a story replete with lessons about the limitations of military power in the contemporary world.
Most of the 193 documents included in the book were top secret and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP), an international consortium of scholars dedicated to the study of the military aspects of the Cold War and its implications for current security issues. The majority of the documents, most of which are excerpted to illustrate the highlights in the development of both the military and the political dimensions of the Warsaw Pact, were translated specifically for this volume and have never appeared in English before. All the materials will be available in full original versions on the PHP website in April 2005.
The volume also features introductory remarks to individual documents by co-editor Malcolm Byrne, which explain the particular significance of each item. A chronology of the main events in the history of the Warsaw Pact, a list of its leading officials, a selective multilingual bibliography, and an analytical index add to the importance of a publication that sets the new standard as a reference work on the subject and facilitate its use by both students and general readers.
The book will be published and ready for sale, in both North America and Europe, in April 2005, the month before the 50th anniversary on May 14 of the signing of the Warsaw Pact. Book launches will be held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, at the University of Vienna, Austria, and in Warsaw, Poland, where the Pact was signed in 1955. |
