The WTO as a Means for Upholding Soviet Military

Preponderance in Eastern Europe 		 
   

Some Background

 
    Not all socialist countries in Eastern Europe accepted the validity of the Brezhnev Doctrine; neither did all of them belong to the Warsaw Pact or endorse collective security on Soviet terms. Yugoslavia followed a nationally distinct trail to socialism, never became a member in the WTO and indeed even denounced it as an imperialist trick. (Bass- Marbury). Albania was a founding member of the Pact, but estranged itself from Soviet- style communism gradually during the sixties and finally withdrew from the Treaty in 1968. Romania, on the other hand, never formally withdrew from the Pact, but did not permit any Pact exercises on its soil since 1963 and rarely partook in those on others'.(Szalowski, p. 7-9). All of these countries adopted doctrines of territorial, national defense. The Yugoslav doctrine was named the "General People's Defense" and was published in 1957. The General People's Defense was based on both regular and paramilitary troops as well as a full-scale mobilization of civilians, and served as a founding element of the country's non-aligned foreign policy. The Romanian equivalent, the doctrine of the "War of the Entire People", relied on wartime mobilization en masse that ultimately would have produced some 5 million men in arms. (Leebaert(ed.), p. 225- 227). In their doctrines both countries assumed that a potential enemy would use conventional rather than nuclear weaponry. The likely force of the enemy was estimated at a figure of 750 000 -1 250 000 soldiers. Both the Yugoslavs and the Romanians maintained that such an army might be able to invade their respective countries, but only at considerable costs for the aggressor. During an occupation, the defense systems of the nations were designed to support the continuity of the leadership's authority over civilians and the supply of domestically produced arms and economic necessities for those civilians. Both doctrines were implicitly aimed at deterring a USSR guided by the principles of the Brezhnev Doctrine.(Christopher Jones, p. 79-83.)

 
    The military doctrine of the Warsaw Pact was closely modeled on its Soviet counterpart and its function was to prevent the remaining East European members of the WTO from adopting doctrines of territorial defense similar to those of Yugoslavia and Romania. (Holloway(ed.), p. 89.). If they had done so, the Soviet say in their internal matters would have diminished greatly and accordingly reduced the depth of the Soviet buffer zone in a possible war with NATO. The importance of the WTO membership of the East European states did not lie so much in the use of their armies but rather in the use of their territories.

 
    The Central- and East European partners to the Warsaw Pact were highly dependent, both materially and in centralized command structure, on the supreme Soviet command of the WTO and dominated by the superior number of Soviet troops on their soil. (Kaufman, p. 108.). At the end of the eighties the USSR still tried to uphold in the bilateral military formations a ratio of 2:1 Soviet to East European personnel. Additional forces (which would not have been paired with multinational contingents) in the European part of the USSR would have altered the ratio further in favor of the Soviets. In practice, however, the 2:1 pairing of troops remained a goal rather than reality throughout the existence of the Pact (Starr(ed.), p. 65.). For instance in 1989 (which is before the substantial revision of Soviet doctrine and the resulting troop withdrawal from Eastern Europe began), the strength of Soviet WTO armed forces in the Northern Tier states consisted of some 26 divisions - 19 in East Germany, only 2 in Poland, and 5 in Czechoslovakia. The contribution of the three states themselves to Pact forces was six solid East German divisions, two to three Czechoslovak divisions and three to four Polish divisions, two of which in reality were only brigade-sized (ibid. p. 66). The indigenous Northern Tier divisions were poorly equipped with the notable exception of the East Germans. (McGregor, p. 63,68-69)

 
    The Warsaw Treaty Organization worked along two lines in denying the East European states the possibility of adopting national military doctrines for the defense of their own territories. The first principle was that a seemingly multinational body exercised the highest authority over their armies and therefore fragmented national control over the components of national armed forces. The second was the pursuit for cohesion and reliability in the East European militaries. This was supposed to be attained by both attitudinal and functional integration of the militaries to Soviet ends. The former meant that the Soviets elaborated a system of agitation-propaganda for sustaining the principles of socialist internationalism and the derivative thought of socialist nations as brothers-in- arms. The latter implied that in the last analysis the East Europeans were given no rational option other than going along with Soviet policy advances.

   jarkko tuominen: What was the WTO's role when USSR collapsed? Had it, as a organisation, any role in defending or destroying the totalitarian regime?

 

   

WTO Military Doctrine as a Control Mechanism

 
    The military doctrine of the WTO was closely modeled on its Soviet counterpart (Szalowski, p. 30.). Although there doesn't seem to have been any central directorate for doctrinal matters in the official WTO structures, the Pact organized conferences and meetings on doctrinal matters with such frequency that they might be regarded as having been part of its administration. The function of these conferences was to transmit the features of Soviet doctrinal conceptions to the East European participants, who were the topmost representatives of national administrative agencies, research institutes and military academies.(Holloway-Sharp(ed.), p. 96). The WTO was also engaged in the voluminous publishing of Soviet military writings and the synchronizing of the East European writing on military doctrine with the views expressed in this Soviet literature. Between 1956 and 1976 the publishing house of the East German army alone released a total of 11 million Soviet books on military issues.(C. Jones, p. 152.). The Commander-in-Chief of the Pact explained the Soviet preponderance in 1972 by stating that "the availability of the extremely rich military experience of the Soviet Armed Forces, of its first-class material-technical base and of its well-trained military cadres - all of this guarantees Soviet military scholars an avant-garde role in the resolution of the problematic tasks of military science". (ibid.)

 
    Soviet doctrine defined specific limits for policies in virtually all areas of military affairs. Soviet, and thereby WTO, doctrine consisted of two mutually dependent and interactive components: the military-technical and the military-political. The military-political component was the more decisive, and gained in importance through the history of the alliance.(Arbatov-Karagonov-Lobov, p. 21-23.).

 
    The military-technical component was based on four practical presuppositions of how to wage war. First, the theory of "military art" on the levels of tactics, strategy and operations argued that the USSR had the right to define the missions of WTO troops in coalition warfare. The theory of "military administration" in practice turned the national defense ministries and their subordinate bodies to analogues of the Soviet ones, thus limiting their role in real terms to that of liaisons offices. "Military economics" fractionalized East European weapons production and left the national armies dependent on Soviet armaments supplies, and "military education" gave the Soviets control over the schooling of WTO officers. (Starr(ed.), p 68-69).

 
    The military-political axioms of the WTO doctrine formed a circular argument in which each axiom was regarded as a basic element of the others: Proletarian internationalism; socialist internationalism; joint coalitional defense of the achievements of socialism; defense of the communist Fatherland; adherence to the combat confederation of the armed forces of the socialist states; the marxist-leninist conception of the necessity of the military-political unity of the armed forces of the socialist states; joint defense of peace.(Leebaert(ed.), p. 226.). Put in a more blatant manner this litany was the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention.

 
    The military-political axioms underlined the importance of coalitional warfare. Reliance on national means of defense was condemned categorically by the USSR as Maoist heresy (Steele(1974), p. 108-113.). Contrariwise, the military-political axioms shared by the WTO members accepted the Soviet argument that the only ideologically correct expression of the national sovereignty of a socialist state was the acceptance of the limitations set on that very sovereignty by military obligations to the socialist confederation headed by the Soviet Union.(Zimmermann, 89-90.)

 
    The combined effect of the military-technical and military-political components of the Warsaw Pact doctrine was partly to legitimize, partly to veil the basically offensive posture of Soviet troops against Eastern Europe, to preempt independent East European defensive capabilities against the USSR and to mobilize elite army contingents from these countries for symbolical and political usage.(Starr (ed.), p. 69.)

 
   

WTO Joint Military Exercises as a Control Mechanism

 
    As with any military alliance, the conduct of joint military exercises was the most prominent activity of the WTO. These exercises can, however, be seen also as the most substantial control mechanism of the organization. If we accept this view, then the object of the joint exercises of the six members of the Warsaw Pact (Romania participated after 1964 only with Staff officers described as observers) can be assumed to have been to deprive the East European members of the alliance the capability to defend their national territories and to give the WTO troops the opportunity to rehearse for potential future interventions. The pattern of the geographical location of the joint exercises would support this view. ( for the locations, see Der Warschauer Vertrag)

 
    In the strategic appliances of WTO joint exercises the emphasis was on the offensive use of huge conventional forces capable of waging a limited nuclear war with Soviet nuclear weapons. It is fairly obvious that when practicing an offensive nuclear war, the opponent of the WTO troops was presumed to be NATO. There is, however, nothing to imply that the nuclear war design was ever intended for anything else than a purely national Soviet offensive.(Leebaert(ed.),p. 230-231.)

 
    The first large-scale Warsaw Pact joint maneuvers occurred in the autumn of 1961, when Polish, East German and Czech units cooperated with Soviet forces (Hoensch in Clawson- Kaplan, p. 36.). Until 1979 71 identified bilateral or multilateral exercises had been conducted.(Korbonski in ibid. p. 10) The Helsinki Accords of 1975 required that both NATO and the WTO were to report maneuvers involving more than 25 000 troops. Before 1975 the WTO reported as having held annually on average six exercises, after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act on average only one. The practical outcome of the Helsinki Agreement in other words was to reduce the size of the joint maneuvers from strategic to tactical level involving less than 25 000 men, since there is nothing to suggest that the military activities of the Pact actually would have subsumed. (Christopher Jones, p. 113)

 
    Of the joint exercises held, no more than one third was conducted on exclusively national territory of any given East European WTO member state. At least one third was held entirely on foreign soil. This meant that no national command ever had the opportunity to drill its own troops on a large scale on domestic territory, thus not having the most elementary prerequisites for a national defensive warfare. Of the remaining one third of maneuvres accomplished on home territory, many were huge multilateral ones in which a number of WTO armies rehearsed attacking national dominions and capturing military objectives by assault. (Holloway-Sharp, p. 94). The armies of any given country were under the supreme command of one of their own generals in no more than one third of the exercises. Only at very few exercises did Soviet troops not partake. Junior Pact member states are not known to have practised maneuvres bilaterally among themselves, whereas the Soviet army held frequent bilateral exercises with its East European counterparts. A remarkable feature of the WTO exercises was that the East European forces partaking at them were integrated into the Soviet troops at a very low level., as very small units. At NATO exercises the national troops as a rule participate as uniform formations having responsibility for solid front sectors. According to documentation the levels of integration at WTO exercises were, quite on the contrary, those of the divisions, of "subunits" (in Soviet usage usually battalions or companies), and of "units" (usually regiments). In other words any East European formation would have been fully dependent on the surrounding components of other national militaries for the execution of its mission (Holloway- Sharp(ed.), p. 94). The integration of the best East European troops into the WTO multilateral army seems to have existed not only at the exercises, but as a permanent feature since the early seventies. This allowed for the constant monitoring and inspection of their reliability. (Szalowski, p. 34).

 
    The WTO exercises appear to have been planned solely by the Joint Staff of the Pact. The national staffs of the countries hosting the maneuvers never had a hand in their drafting. As has been maintained in the section on WTO military structures, the Joint Staff did not have any rear or logistics functions of its own, which raised the suspicion that it would have been dismantled during war for the benefit of the Soviet General Staff. The WTO Joint Staff itself was firmly in the hands of the Soviets, since it was by definition headed by a Soviet general and since they had the right to commission officers to it at will. The joint exercises were carried out under the auspices and inspection of these officers. (John Erickson in Schöpflin(ed.), p. 228)

 
    Another fact that seems to point to the intentional undermining of East European national defense capabilities was the stress on a very specific type of warfare at the exercises. Most WTO maneuvres were namely carried out as swift offensive actions. Since the doctrines of the Pact declared it a defensive organization, nothing seems to have formally warranted this.(Arbatov-Karagonov-Lobov, p. 23). The effect of the emphasis on assault was to render the planning and rehearsing of national East European defense even more difficult. The same emphasis on assault made the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia an easy meal.

 
    The joint exercises also served as a vital means for attaining an attitudinal cohesion of the united armed forces. The prompt actions of offense took turns with political rallies and friendship meetings between soldiers of fellow nations carried out under the supervision of political officers in the spirit of true marxism-leninism. During the major "Brotherhood-in- Arms"-exercises hundreds of such programs of "agitation-propaganda" and "cultural enlightenment" underlining proletarian internationalism and reducing feelings of nationalism, were put into practice. (Der Warschauer Vertrag). For the Soviets any feelings of East European nationalism were anathema, especially since such sentiments usually coincided with overt anti-sovietism. In order to steer these feelings toward less perilous waters the USSR is known to have fed national controversies between the East Europeans themselves, thus infesting the old motto of "divide and rule" with true meaning. (J.F Brown in Schöpflin(ed.), p. 290-292).

 
    The leading role of the Soviet army was asserted at the political propaganda rallies of the exercises, often in a symbolic language blatantly offensive to East European patriotic sensibilities. The message was frequently made clear with the metaphor of the Russian soldier as the elder brother of his East European likes. Big brother's selfless help to his siblings was stated to have started when he freed the peoples of East Central Europe from the Nazi yoke; today this selfless help continues under the auspices of the WTO.(Starr(ed.), p. 70, see also Der Warschauer Vertrag). Or, as Krasnaja Zvezda more succinctly put it: "Yes, and they (the soldiers of the fraternal nations; my remark) understand and recognize that the older brother in this family is the Soviet soldier, who defended his Fatherland, who brought freedom to the peoples of Europe and who in his victory was always true to the international proletariat and struggled for the happiness of mankind".(cited in Jones, p. 129).

 
    At the level of officers the Soviets were perhaps even more concerned with the question of functional integration, that is, the officers were made to understand that for their own good the only rational way of acting was to go along with the Soviets. The system of Warsaw Pact exercises afforded the high-ranking officers of the Joint Staff the evaluate the performances of East European officers. The maneuvers were frequently identified as the most critical examination of the skills of individual officers directly influencing their future careers (ibid. p. 125). Since the Joint Staff was manned chiefly by Soviet nationals, one may feel ascertained that only those East Europeans who showed sufficient loyalty to Soviet interests and WTO military doctrine rose in ranks.

 
   

WTO Officer Education as a Control Mechanism

 
    The officer education system of the Warsaw Pact played a central role in incorporating WTO institutions and national East European defense institutions into Soviet aims. In any given East European army the prospect of attaining one of the higher military commands seems to have been severely circumscribed by not having a learned degree from a Soviet military academy. The East European graduates of the higher Soviet military academies provided a liaison between the Soviet army and the national defense institutions and could expect Soviet patronage for loyalty and services rendered (Holden, p. 20,67).

 
    The communist armies had the highest ratio of high-ranking officers and generals in relation to rank-and-file in the world (Hufvudstadsbladet 17.11.1996). Becoming an officer was a careers option for East European youngsters aspiring for social status. The majority of East European officers began their education at national officer candidate schools. For these officers the critical decision pertaining to advancement in ranks came in midcareer when in their late twenties. Either they could continue their studies at the domestic institutes for higher military learning and after examination get assigned to one of the large number of less important national units of low category status, or, alternatively, enroll at one of the Soviet military academies. At least 16 of such Soviet Military Academies have been identified as having trained East European officers for command positions in the elite East European units that participated as tightly integrated forces at the WTO multilateral exercises.(Christopher Jones, p. 212-214). Though the officers who chose the "Soviet" option appear to have been largely self-selected, they nevertheless opted to go through a rigorous process of admission to these academies and to meet the academic and marxist- leninist ideological standards of their Soviet alma mater. (Starr(ed.), p. 74-75). The consequent schooling of the East European officer corps at Soviet academies was a further elaboration of the principles of attitudinal and functional integration: Attitudinal in the sense that it sought to enhance common ideological commitments through alternating military studies proper with blatant propaganda, functional in the sense that the East Europeans were made to understand that the adherence to Soviet rules and the transmitting of these rules to their own nationals brought rewards as careers opportunities.

 
    What this system in effect produced was elite officers who were able to combine superior Soviet military-technical skills with the still more important political skills of learning to take orders in Russian and to reissue them in their native languages at home (Starr(ed.), p. 74). This liaisoning was essential for quelling any feelings of nationalism in the East European armies and for the pursuit of reliability among them. Reliability and motivation in the allied armies would have had to stem from a perception of common purpose and at least a modicum of national autonomy in military matters.(Gati, p. 154). The use of East European officers for advocating goals that primarily were Soviet created an illusion of such common purpose and national autonomy.

 
    For the indigenous East European political and military leaderships this brought along the delicate task of balancing between the demand for legitimate statehood and the need for national identification of their troops on one hand, and the externally imposed requirement to serve as a bulwark for the Soviet regional security system on the other.(McGregor, p.109). The interests of the military leaders of East Central Europe and of the USSR grew all the more reciprocal over time as the leaders understood that the ongoing stationing of Soviet troops in their countries ultimately was a guarantee for them not being ousted from power.(ibid.)

 
    The virtually only path to the absolutely highest military elites on national level was through the acquisition of a degree in Military Science from the Moscow-based Voroshilov General Staff Academy. The Voroshilov Academy was the only institution in the socialist commonwealth (Romania excepted) that provided teaching on the operational-strategic level, the doctrine of which was the waging of war on a continental scale by a coalition of national armies using nuclear weapons. The Academy accepted as students East European military men with the rank of colonel or general.(Leebaert, p. 246).When graduated from the academy, these enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the highest commands both in the national East European armies and in the ranks of the WTO itself. By way of illustration, in 1976 four out of five East European WTO Defense Ministers (in communist countries these also serve as Commanders-in-Chief.), all five Chiefs of Staff and four out of five Chiefs of Main Political Administration were Voroshilov alumni. The one Defense Minister and the one MPA Chief who weren't, had been commissioned to their duties before the first contingent of students from the Academy had graduated.(Christopher Jones, p. 225.)

 
   

Armaments Production as a Control Mechanism

 
    The Soviet Union paid heavily for the privilege of being the dominant member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The contribution of the USSR to the defense spending of the Pact was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 %.(Clawson-Kaplan, p. 214).Yet EastEuropean economists were complaining, although mutedly, about the social and political costs of their defense burdens, a mere 3 to 6 per cent of the countries' GNP's in the mid-eighties compared to the Soviet figure of 14 per cent (Erickson in Schöpflin, p. 229). The high figure was due mostly to Soviet arms production, armaments buildup and research and development. The low spending of the East European governments similarly was a result of them being bent on producing standardized, light weaponry with limited R & D.(ibid.)

 
    According to the military-technical axiom of the WTO, the ideologically and economically sound system of weapons production within the Pact was an international specialization and division of labour.(Starr, p. 75). All members of the Pact had some capacity for producing armaments, and already well before the communist takeover the three Northern Tier states had had comprehensive and refined arms industries. In about 1970 the Soviets however began to exert strong pressures upon their East European allies to abandon these comprehensive armaments programs and, indeed, most forms of indigenous weapons production altogether in favor of a division of labour between the different countries of the socialist commonwealth (Holloway-Sharp, p. 67). There were visible tensions between national production and international integration through specialization, but this did not hinder the carrying out of the specializations policies under the auspices of the COMECON, the Military-Scientific Committee of the WTO and the Technical Committee of the same.(Starr, p. 75). This led to the fractionalization of the domestic armaments industries, so that each member of the Pact from now on produced only a few, multilaterally strictly specified, types of military equipment.

 
    Generally speaking the newly imposed division of labour in the camp came to mean that the Soviet Union would be the only nation engaged in sophisticated research and development of new weapons systems. Only after the research on a specific piece of military equipment had been fully conducted and the Soviets had started their own serial production of that piece did they transfer the blueprints and technical documentation to their allies. The lack of independent East European research meant that the organic affiliation of basic research with production was broken off as far as the junior WTO members were concerned, thus not resulting in any spin-off effects benefiting the technical base of their societies. This pattern was clear in the production of aircraft, armored vehicles and tanks. Charges were also made to the effect that East European R&D was discouraged by the WTO rejecting weapons designs simply because they were not Soviet. (Holloway-Sharp, p. 66-71)

 
    The armaments that the East European WTO states were permitted to produce were in most instances light and standardized. For heavy weaponry, such as artillery, combat tanks and jet-fighters they were reliant on Soviet supplies.(ibid.). The alleged political reliability of the individual Pact members seems to have affected considerations of who was to produce what: while Czechoslovakia was allowed to fabricate howitzers and amphibious armored vehicles, the East Germans for a long time had be content with producing munitions, optical instruments, spare parts and cloth for uniforms (McGregor, p. 44). All WTO member-states produced small arms.

 
    The Soviets defended the system of labor division on grounds of efficiency. Only the USSR was declared to have the capacity to produce all ranges of weapons. The policy of specialization however proved to be far from a success. The overall quality and sophistication of East European-made armaments dropped dramatically since the inauguration of the specializations policies in the early seventies. Beside the Soviet Union only Czechoslovakia continued to produce sophisticated, indigenously designed heavy arms into the 1990's.(Holloway-Sharp, p. 72)

 
    Romania was the only East European WTO nation which made a divergent point in regard to the policies imposed as it, in accordance with its military doctrine, sought to continue its reliance on comprehensive domestic fabrication of weapons. Where the Romanians were not able to maintain self-sufficiency, they often went outside the socialist orbit for military items; for French choppers, for British aircraft and tanks (John Erickson in Dawisha, p. 161). The other Pact militaries were left wholly dependent on Soviet benevolence and to a lesser degree on one another for supplies of all but the most basic military equipment.(Erickson in Clawson-Kaplan, p. 215).