ABSTRACT
The Soviets have attempted to solve the problems of the political reliability of the East European forces of the Warsaw Pact by detaching components of national military forces from the control of national defense ministries and then linking these components to the Soviet armed forces. The establishment of the Warsaw Pact testified to Soviet alarm over the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany into North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In its post-1945 permutation, the German question remained at the center of the Soviet Union’s European security problem: the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not only a German state but a socialist state as well, and the survival of the GDR became linked to the survival of the domestic regimes of the other socialist states of the region. The officer chosen to strengthen the overlapping bilateral ties within the Warsaw Pact was Marshal A. A. Grechko, who took over the command of the Warsaw Pact in July 1960.
