Introduction to the Jervis Forum Roundtable of Review Essays on Mark Kramer, The Fate of the Soviet Bloc’s Military Alliance: Reform, Adaptation, and Collapse of the Warsaw Pact, 1985–1991

Authors

• Cynthia A. Roberts, CUNY Hunter CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

This introduction frames a Jervis Forum roundtable of review essays on Mark Kramer’s study of the final years of the Warsaw Pact and situates the book within broader scholarship on the end of the Cold War. It examines Kramer’s archivally- grounded argument that the alliance’s collapse was not predetermined but followed from a consequential Soviet policy shift under Mikhail Gorbachev, particularly the decision to renounce military intervention to preserve communist regimes in Eastern Europe. This introduction considers changes in Soviet military doctrine, civil-military relations, arms-control priorities, and Moscow’s effort to transform rather than abolish the alliance. It also situates Kramer’s interpretation within debates over Soviet and East European agency, the unintended consequences of reform, and the relationship between political change and military retrenchment, while introducing the perspectives developed by the roundtable’s reviewers

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