Abstract
Recently released documents from the Romanian military archives relating to Romania's stance within the Warsaw Pact permit a more refined view of Romania's autonomy within the Pact than has hitherto been possible. They show that the conventional assertion that Nicolae Ceauşescu refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 is misleading since he was not invited by the Soviet Union to participate in it. They reveal details of the pressure put on Romania by the Soviet Union after 1968 to toe the Warsaw Pact line, ranging from the imperious comments of General Shtemenko in February 1970 to a senior Romanian officer, to Brezhnev's accusation, levelled at Ceauşescu in person, that the latter intended to leave the Pact. Yet it was the direct challenge to Communist domination by Solidarity in Poland in 1981 that, as these documents show, led Ceauşescu to see the value of the Pact. By the summer of 1989, he had become the advocate of intervention in Poland in order to preserve Socialist solidarity and the cohesion of the Pact.
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