Warsaw Pact

   Officially named the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, the pact was a military and economic alliance of the Marxist–Leninist Eastern Bloc countries signed in 1955 to consolidate resistance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The founding signatories were Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union, with the German Democratic Republic joining in 1956. Yugoslavia was the only local communist country omitted, having been jettisoned from the Warsaw Pact’s predecessor, the Cominform, in 1948. The Pact allowed Moscow to plant Red Army troops across the region, though guaranteeing the sovereignty of its individual members in state affairs. Despite this, the Soviet Union twice invoked the Pact to put down dissent, first during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and then the 1968 Prague Spring, moves that prompted the already recalcitrant Albanians to leave the agreement. By the early 1990s the collapse of the communist regimes in most of the Pact member countries rendered it superfluous, and it was declared “nonexistent” in July 1991.