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PRESS
RELEASE: 30
May 2001
COLD
WAR MILITARY DELIBERATIONS REVEALED:
SECRET
WARSAW PACT RECORDS PUBLISHED
Secret
records of the top-level discussions of the Soviet-led military
alliance that was the West's main rival from 1955 to 1991 are being
made public on the Zurich-based World Wide Web site of the
Parallel
History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP)—an
international consortium of scholars
dedicated to the study of the historical background of European
security: http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch.
The
PHP initiates the publication of records from the meetings of the
three key committees of the Warsaw Pact:
-
Political
Consultative Committee, where policy issues were discussed at
the highest level from the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955
until its collapse in 1991,
-
Committee
of the Ministers of Defense, which met every year since 1969
to discuss the military dimension of the Warsaw Pact's rivalry
with NATO, and
-
Committee
of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, designed to coordinate
the foreign policies of the Soviet allies.
Among
the preliminary findings from the documents are the following:
1.
The Warsaw Pact was originally created to ensure Soviet dominance
of European security by political means and only later became a
full-fledged military alliance.
2.
In learning
from NATO's experience, the Warsaw Pact sometimes tried to adapt
NATO's features to its own purposes.
3.
The crisis
of NATO in the late 1960s was paralleled by a crisis of the Warsaw
Pact, both of which led to the consolidation of both alliances just
as the crisis of the Soviet system began to set in.
4.
East European
communist regimes tried to use the Warsaw Pact as a vehicle of their
interests in cooperation with Moscow rather than in opposition to
it.
5.
A multinational
officer corps owed its primary loyalty to the Warsaw Pact.
6.
The Warsaw
Pact leaders regarded NATO as a primarily political threat, to which
they were prepared to respond by an offensive military strategy
in case of a crisis.
7.
Advances
in NATO's conventional rather than nuclear armaments were eventually
perceived by the Warsaw Pact as a challenge it was unable to meet.
The
publication of the records of the Political
Consultative Committee (PCC) starts off with the Committee's
first meeting in 1956 and will proceed chronologically in stages.
It includes documents obtained from different archives of the former
member countries of the Warsaw Pact.
The
over 2,500 pages of the documents of the Committee
of the Ministers of Defense (CMD) published on the PHP website
are facsimiles of East German records of its meetings, preserved
at the Military Branch of the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv)
in Freiburg im Breisgau.
The
records of the meetings of the Committee
of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs (CMFA) from Czech, Hungarian,
and German archives will be added on the website in the second half
of 2001.
The
online publication of the CMD records is a pioneering venture undertaken
in collaboration with the Federal Archives of Germany. The
documents,
reproduced in their original languages—mostly German and sometimes
Russian—are simultaneously available on the Bundesarchiv homepage, www.bundesarchiv.de.
The
website is part of the International Relations and Security Network
(ISN), operated by the Center for Security Studies and Conflict
Research at ETH Zurich in cooperation with the National Security
Archive, a nongovernmental research institute in Washington.
For
further information, contact the Project Coordinator, Vojtech Mastny,
at Mst3696 (at) aol.com, or Christian Nünlist, Center for Security
Studies and Conflict Research, at nuenlist (at) sipo.gess.ethz.ch.
PARALLEL HISTORY PROJECT ON NATO AND THE WARSAW
PACT (PHP)
Sponsored by the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research
of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich,
the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in
Washington, DC,
and the Institute of Military Studies in Vienna
In association with the Cold War International History Project of
the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, Hannah Arendt Institute
for Research on Totalitarianism, Dresden, Institute of Political
Studies, Warsaw, Cold War Research Group, Sofia, Institute of
International Relations, Prague, Cold War History Research Center,
Budapest,
Affiliated with the Partnership for Peace |