Introduction

For more than three decades, the Warsaw Treaty Organization stood as one of the symbols of Moscow's influence in Eastern Europe. When Eastern European archives were made available in the 1990s, it sparked a new wave of interest in the Warsaw Pact among historians. Apart from the already mentioned publications, there were a number of thematic anthologies published in the first decade of the new millennium dealing with a choice of political and military aspects of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. A historian's judgment will always be at least partly affected by the era in which he or she creates and by the author's attitudes. Archival material of Soviet origin is a specific issue. The expert military journals printed by member armies represent a special kind of source as these texts were composed with an extreme emphasis on ideological views.