Warsaw Pact to Disband Its Military Structure

The Soviet Union, accepting the final collapse of the security buffer it built across Eastern Europe, agreed on Tuesday with its partners in the Warsaw Pact to dismantle the alliance’s military structure by April.

“The countries that make up the Warsaw Treaty Organization have concluded that the time has come to take steps to wind up the organization’s military structure,” presidential press secretary Vitaly N. Ignatenko said.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in endorsing proposals by Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, hoped that the move would contribute to the general rapprochement in Europe and draw “a suitable response from the NATO countries,” Ignatenko told correspondents.

With more than 6.3 million troops, the Warsaw Pact had projected Kremlin power across Europe and much of the world for 35 years, but it became an empty shell after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

“The need for the Warsaw Pact as a military organization has passed, and as such alliance it should fade into history, too,” Ignatenko said. “Our countries all concluded that we should dismantle the military structure and finish this process by April 1.”

The Soviet Union hopes, however, that most of the other pact members will agree to retain the organization as a regional framework for political consultations, officials said.

“Both as neighbors and as ‘formerly socialist’ countries, we have common problems to discuss,” a Soviet foreign ministry official commented. “We see a need for some mechanism, including regular summit-level meetings, to approach these problems.”

Moscow in addition is negotiating bilateral defense agreements with its neighbors, largely to ensure continued deliveries of military equipment.

The foreign and defense ministers of the alliance’s six remaining members--Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania as well as the Soviet Union--will meet in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, on Feb. 25 to work out details of the pact’s dissolution as a military alliance.

“This will be a historic moment in the life of the nation,” Hungarian Prime Minister Jozsef Antall said in Budapest. “It will bring an era to an end.”

Soviet-led forces from the Warsaw Pact invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush reform movements, and East Europeans generally saw the Soviet troops in their countries as an occupying army, preventing any political or economic liberalization.

Formed in 1955 in response to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose mission was to contain the advance of communism in Europe, the Warsaw Pact also included Albania and East Germany at the outset, but Albania withdrew in 1962 and East Germany ceased to be a member last year when Germany was unified.

Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland have been pushing for nearly a year for the pact’s dissolution, but the Soviet Union had held them off because of the need to conclude the treaty with NATO on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe as well as a non-aggression agreement between the two blocs.

With those agreements signed in Paris in November, the pressure on Moscow increased with even Bulgaria, the closest of all Soviet allies, declaring last week that it was ready to quit.