CAR: Cold War Defense, Soviet Side (April 12)

Concepts:

• Stages in the Cold War:
• Containment
• Detente
• Rollback
• Brezhnev Doctrine: Soviet foreign policy established in 1968, which justified the use of Soviet armed forces to intervene in its satellite states to maintain Soviet-style communist rule.

Fragment from the speech given by Leonid Brezhnev, Premier of the Soviet Union, to Polish workers, on the topic of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring in 1968: 

"Each Communist party cannot but take into account such a decisive fact of our time as the struggle between two opposing social systems-capitalism and socialism. This is an objective struggle, a fact not depending on the will of the people, and stipulated by the world's being split into two opposite social systems. Lenin said: "Each man must choose between joining our side or the other side. Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue must end in fiasco." It has got to be emphasized that when a socialist country seems to adopt a "non­affiliated" stand, it retains its national independence, in effect, precisely because of the might of the socialist community, and above all the Soviet Union as a central force, which also includes the might of its armed forces. The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, which cannot look indifferently upon this."

• Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON): Established in 1949 and dissolved in 1991, COMECON was meant to provide a socialist alternative to the Marshall Plan for countries that were both socialist and close to the the United States, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. The approach varied in its 40-year history, but it was essentially a forum for the governments of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Mongolia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam to discuss how to plan their economies with the special guidance of the Soviet Union.
• Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (Warsaw Pact): A collective defense treaty established in 1955 as a response to the inclusion of West Germany in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and as the instrument to implement the Brezhnev Doctrine, particularly in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Its members were:
• Soviet Union
• Bulgaria
• Hungary
• Poland
• Romania
• Czechoslovakia
• Poland
• Albania (until 1968)
• East Germany

"On Guard for Peace and Socialism"