ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union has tended to regard the countries of the southern tier of the Warsaw Pact — Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria — as having less strategic importance than the countries of the northern tier. They represent useful military assets, but none are critical for the defense of the central front; nor do they have the same economic significance that the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia have for the Soviet Union. As a result, Moscow has tended to be more tolerant of deviations in the southern tier. A major factor is the prospect of increased instability in Yugoslavia. Many East European leaders sought to exploit Moscow’s preoccupation with the succession problem in the Kremlin in order to expand their room for maneuver domestically, as in Hungary, and to a lesser degree in Bulgaria, or externally, as in the case of Romania.
