Cardboard Castle? An Inside History Of The Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991

The first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable as outsiders often believed, nor were its strengths and weaknesses the same at different times in its surprisingly long history, extending for almost half a century. The lengthy introductory study is followed by 193 documents, most of them top secret when created and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, an international consortium of scholars. The majority of the texts have never appeared in English before, and each of them is accompanied by explanatory remarks. A chronology of the main events in the history of the Warsaw Pact, a list of its leading officials, a selective multilingual bibliography, and an analytical index completes the book.Masyny, Vojtech is the author of 'Cardboard Castle? An Inside History Of The Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991', published 2005 under ISBN 9789637326080 and ISBN 9637326081.