The End of a Cold War Military Alliance in Europe: The Disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, 1985–1991

When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation – commonly known as the Warsaw Pact – was a robust military alliance that deployed vast numbers of combat forces against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The Pact not only was capable of waging a large-scale war in Europe but was also an instrument of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, safeguarding loyal Communist regimes. In addition, the alliance over the years had become an effective mechanism of political coordination and consultation. In late April 1985, Gorbachev and the other Warsaw Pact leaders met in Warsaw on the 30th anniversary of the Pact and agreed to renew it for another 30 years. Yet only 6 years later, in mid-1991, the Warsaw Pact was formally disbanded, having been rendered obsolete by the political transformation of Eastern Europe. Drawing on declassified archival documents, memoirs and published sources from the countries of the former Soviet bloc, this article provides a survey of the Warsaw Pact's final years and explains why the organisation ceased to exist in 1991. The article sets this process in the broader context of the reorientation of Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Because major changes in military structures and deployments can often take years to carry out, the Warsaw Pact was still largely intact by the time the upheavals of 1989 in Eastern Europe altered the entire political complexion of the Soviet bloc and undermined the raison d'être of the alliance. Despite Moscow's efforts in 1990 to preserve the Warsaw Pact and to convert it into a mainly political forum, the fate of the organisation was sealed by the events of 1989.