nevertheless adopted political self-restrictions in deference to the military might of
its large neighbor, the Soviet Union. For example, Finland followed a foreign pol-
icy of strict neutrality, and the Finnish press engaged in self-censorship, rarely
criticizing Soviet actions or even providing much coverage of aggression against
other states, such as the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet military.
The Warsaw Pact and COMECON represented official organizations composed
of Soviet satellite states. The official document that formed the Warsaw Pact was
the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed in 1955. The
members of the Warsaw Pact stretched through Eastern Europe from Poland in the
north to Bulgaria in the south, sharing their easternboundarieswith the USSR.
Initially only Yugoslavia, which did not have a common border with the Soviet
Union, remained outside the organization although Albania, a charter member, later
withdrew its membership. The geographical proximity of the Soviet Union played a
key role in maintaining the satellite relationship. Those countries that occasionally
deviated from the expectations imposed by Moscow could be readily brought to heel
by the Soviet military, as happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
When the Communist Party in Hungary attempted sweeping reforms in 1956, Soviet
troops invaded the country and after heavy loss of life, crushed the reformists,
replaced the regime with officials who supported retaining close ties to the Soviet
government, and continued to follow the dictates of Marxist-Leninist ideology. This
tragic episode made clear that Moscow had no intention of allowing any of the clus-
ter of satellites it had secured along the USSR’s western margin to remove them-
selves from its orbit. A similar series of events transpired in Czechoslovakia in
1968 during the so-called “Prague Spring,” although the level of violence and loss
of life was much lower than in Hungary in 1956.
The countries of the Warsaw Pact were not the only Soviet satellites during the
era of the Cold War. Mongolia, a state occupying a strategic position between the
People’s Republic of China and the USSR, closely aligned its foreign policy with
that of the USSR after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. Moreover, satellite states were
established inregionswell beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, the most
prominent being Cuba. The proximity of Cuba to the United States and its role as
a Soviet satellite generated serious and dangerous tensions after 1959; the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the United States and the USSR to the brink of
war. The crisis was set in motion when the Soviet government placed offensive
nuclear missiles in Cuba that could strike the entire continental United States, an
escalation of tensions that the American administration of John Kennedy was
unprepared to accept. For ten days in October 1962 the United States and the Soviet
Union teetered on the precipice of war, a conflict that almost certainly would have
resulted in the annihilation of both countries and their allies. Eventually the crisis
Satellite State 295