ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Soviet connections of the East European military establishments. It analyses the military relationship between the Soviet Union and its East European client-states, incorporated in the Warsaw Pact. The national armed forces in East European countries after 1947 were largely "empty shells"—small, poorly supplied with often obsolete equipment, and neutralized by occupying Soviet forces. The network of bilateral defense treaties and the dependency of the East European Communist parties on Moscow notwithstanding, consolidation of national Party control over the respective East European armed forces was for Stalin an inadequate guarantee that they would be fully responsive to Soviet directives. The founding in 1955 of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, as the formal multilateral security alliance of the states within the Soviet orbit, had little to do with the process of rationalizing the Soviet and East European military establishments.
