Abstract
The article traces the evolution of the various instruments used by the Soviet military and political leadership to control the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact states. It concludes that the Soviet leadership at first tried to use Soviet military advisers to control Pact forces. This tool proved to be unsuccessful and was later replaced with the concept of integration of these units into a multinational socialist army. When in the early 1980s this instrument also proved to be inadequate, the Soviet elite began the incorporation of these units into the Soviet army through their direct subordination to Soviet commands and operational desiderata. Through a case study of the Bulgarian and Hungarian armed .forces, the article then proceeds to examine the concept of reliability of Warsaw Pact armies and evaluates the extent of their reliability in terms of the dual instruments of integration and subordination to Soviet military needs.
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