On The Eve Of The Romanian Revolution (V) Whose Military Preparations?

Aside from their insistence during the spring and summer of 1989 on allegedly “solid evidence” of “corpses floating on the rivers bordering the two countries,” and on Bucharest’s nuclear “blackmail” against Hungary, Szűrös, Tabadji and Horn also insisted that senior Romanian military leaders were laying claim to portions of Hungarian territory, threatening invasion, and mobilizing their troops along the Hungarian frontier in evident preparation for the same.[i] According to U.S. and NATO military intelligence sources there were in fact no redeployments of significant Romanian forces during the last half of the 1980s before the revolution. Romanian territorial defense plans did not require greater forward troop deployments even under the most threatening of conditions.

Soviet Tanks Withdrawing from Hungary

In contrast, and according to those same U.S. and NATO sources, significant Hungarian and Soviet military units had been redeploying from the western Hungarian border with Austria towards the eastern border with Romania since at least April 1989.[ii] With the help of the Bloc-wide active measures apparatus this movement was plausibly advertised as motivated purely by the desire to create a “zone of peace” with Austria and thus symbolizing the lack of any Hungarian, Soviet or Warsaw Pact threat towards the West. Even Western analysts who had underscored the greater likelihood of hostilities between Hungary and Warsaw Pact ally Romania than between Hungary and any NATO or neutral state as much as a decade earlier now thought it unlikely that either Moscow or Budapest could be redeploying their troops nearer the Romanian frontier for operational purposes.[iii]

General Ferenc Kárpáti

The first mild American suspicions regarding Budapest’s intentions were provoked by overly insistent denials that any Hungarian or Soviet troops had been or were being redeployed. For example, at the beginning of July 1989 Hungarian Defense Minister Ferenc Kárpáti declared that reports of Soviet troop redeployments from the border with Austria to the border “with Romania was ‘scare news’ that had no foundation whatsoever.”[iv] Such denials were counterproductive to the aim of concealing force redeployments given U.S. technical intelligence collection capabilities at the time, which monitored those very same troop movements. Only two weeks earlier a Soviet motorized rifle regiment had redeployed from Szombathely in western Hungary to Debrecen, less than 20 miles (31 km) from the Romanian border, where there was a long-established Soviet military presence.[v]

Of course, the Soviet military had proven adept at concealing significant force movements from the United States (using deception techniques termed maskirovka by the Russians). For example, Moscow and Budapest had successfully masked the influx of about 20,000 Soviet troops into Hungary during the 1980s such that, even in 1989, many Western analysts were undercounting Soviet forces deployed in that country by some two divisions.[vi] Officially, Hungary reported that there were 62,000 Soviet troops on Hungarian territory while NATO believed there to be 65,000.[vii] More accurate reports identified the presence of some 83,000 Soviet troops).[viii] In addition, the other Pact members routinely ran exercises specifically designed to mislead Western observers, especially NATO member military attachés posted to their countries, as to the true purpose of mobilizations and exercises.[ix]

Soviet Tanks on the move in Hungary, 1989

Certainly, the eastward redeployments in 1989 confirmed Hungary’s “zone of peace” with Austria. But they equally supported the force shift requirements of the new Hungarian defense doctrine, which identified Romania as the principal military threat. Concealing those force shifts from the public eye – regardless of whether they comprised Soviet or Hungarian troops – ran counter to Budapest’s (and Moscow’s) stated goal of diminishing confrontation. The lack of transparency regarding those redeployments also ran counter to the presumed goals of gaining prestige points for military disengagement, or even of intimidation and deterrence. Such purposes are best served not by concealing force relocations but by explicitly signaling them through noisy advertisement.

Applying Ockham’s Razor, the covert re-deployment of troops towards the Hungarian-Romanian border strongly suggested operational preparations that Budapest and Moscow wished to keep secret (although the Hungarians and the Soviets may well have differed over the reason for them). The Warsaw Pact’s Secretary General at the time, Ivan Aboimov, who headed the Soviet crisis group on Romania during the events of December 1989, later noted in an unguarded aside to a Russian journalist: “Hungary wanted us to interfere in Romania, because they hoped to solve the Transylvanian problem.”[x] While Aboimov did not specify whether the Soviet interference desired by Hungary was military, repeated failures to influence Romanian policy along political lines suggest that Budapest may have sought more coercive intervention.[xi] 
         Of course, by the end of December 1989 Gorbachev was not interested in military intervention, regardless of whatever contingency plans existed previously. Prior to that, however, the question of Kremlin intent was certainly an open one. And even in December 1989 the Soviet military and the KGB held many opinions at variance with those of their commander-in-chief.

Karoly Grosz and Ceauşescu, 1988

Hungarian party leader and Prime Minister Karoly Grosz also inadvertently revealed that Hungarian troop redeployments towards the southeastern border were operational measures intended to address the “Romanian threat.” When queried several months after those events about his expressed intention to employ military force against Hungary’s domestic opposition, Grosz misinterpreted the object of the question and 'astonished his interviewer with the following declaration:

                                                           

At that time, our relations with Romania were very strained, due to the problems of the Hungarians in Transylvania. Having received nuclear threats from Ceauşescu  I had troops along the Austrian border transferred to the border with Romania. That troop movement may have been perceived by Western intelligence services as preparation for military action.[xii]

Thus, precisely at the time Budapest was accusing Bucharest of aggressive military preparations and deployments that had no basis in fact, Hungarian (and Soviet) forces were covertly re-deploying from the Austrian border to the Romanian frontier for purposes linked to the ethnic Hungarians on Romanian territory. There was nothing surprising in this. Various Hungarian authorities had gone on the public record with essentially the same story as much as a half a year earlier, only their comments were generally lost in the publicity given to the new Hungarian defense strategy, which was not only contrasted to the former more offensive footing of the “closely cooperating” partners within the Pact towards the West but was also presented as a policy completely “independent” of Moscow.[xiii]

If there was one set of issues that the United States verified seriously and in a consistent manner throughout the Cold War, it was the movement of significant Warsaw Pact military forces and any preparations for military conflict undertaken within the Soviet Bloc. Indeed, the principal U.S. preoccupation during the Cold War was averting a military confrontation, regardless of whether it began between the USA and the USSR directly or whether it came about catalytically, in consequence of escalating conflict between lesser allies. Given that the effectiveness of any disinformation is dependent on the lack of serious verification by the target audience, and that it cannot long survive close scrutiny, Soviet deception and disinformation operations regarding military preparations were among the most difficult to maintain.[xiv] 

            Ordinarily, close scrutiny can be avoided if disinformation comes in confirmation of existing cognitive biases; if it conforms to patterns of previous behavior; if it falls within the current logic of the situation; and/or if it echoes similar developments elsewhere in the region. As noted, there is a general human tendency not to scrutinize closely information confirming what is ‘known’ to be true already. However, no matter what misperceptions regarding Romanian aggressiveness may have existed within the U.S. analytical community at the end of the 1980s, reports of preparations for a military confrontation were bound to draw exactly the sorts of close scrutiny that were fatal to disinformation.

            Thus, for example, when Horn and Szűrös accused an unnamed “Romanian Army Chief of Staff” of demanding Hungarian territory and were subsequently pressed for “more details” as to the precise identity of that Chief of Staff and the exact phrasing of his demand, they lamely referred their interlocutors to a “military” publication of 1988 which they were “unable to identify” further.[xv] U.S. analysts then tracked down the 1988 publication, which did reference Romanian-speaking islands on the Hungarian side of the frontier after World War I. However, the article was authored by a civilian, made no pretense to military authority, referenced no Romanian military personnel, and made no claims on Hungarian territory.[xvi] 

John Reed

Moreover, the author cited a wartime publication by an American journalist, Milton Lehrer, as source for the existence of those Romanian-speaking islands.[xvii] Interestingly, the American journalist John Reed – no admirer of the Romanians – had made the same observation in the midst of World War I, describing from first-hand observation how one could travel from Transylvania “across Hungary as far as Buda-Pesth and beyond without speaking any language but Romanian.”[xviii]

            Szűrös tried to misdirect attention from the Hungarian source of the allegations by citing “reports in the western media about [Romanian] military reinforcements on Romania’s border with Hungary.”[xix] However, closer scrutiny proved 

Szűrös and Gorbachev, 1989

unable to turn up “any such Western press reports or any evidence of Romanian military reinforcements” beyond Western coverage of the original allegations made by Tabajdi, Poszgay, Horn, and by Szűrös himself.[xx]  When western interlocutors pointed out that while political officials in Budapest frequently discussed the growing “possibility of military conflict” with Romania in the Hungarian press, such prognostications were not at all reflected in the Romanian media, Szűrös fell back on the active measures theme that no information provided by Bucharest was credible and that “what the Romanian press wrote was ‘irrelevant’” because, he claimed, Budapest was uniquely able to “find out Romanian intentions from other sources.”[xxi]

The startling nature and superficiality of these allegations recalled some of the more inventive humor from the deep freeze of the Cold War invoking the authority of Radio Yerevan. Following the standard introduction “Армянское радио спрашивает… – “Armenian Radio says…” – the joke confirmed the absolute veracity of a sensational report and then added, as apparent afterthought, a list of fundamental modifications until it was evident that the original claims had virtually no relationship to the reality whatsoever. By the spring of 1989 the international media was inundated with reports of an increasingly aggressive Romanian military. Hungarian officials persistently alleged that: (1) Romania’s Chief of Staff made claims on Hungarian territory and demanded border changes in Romania’s favor[xxii]; (2) the Romanian Army was preparing to launch unprovoked military operations against Hungary[xxiii]; and (3) Ceauşescu was threatening Hungary with a nuclear attack seeking to acquire the means to launch it.[xxiv]

In verifying these accusations Western analysts discovered that:

·         The issue of Romanian-speaking islands existing in Hungary after the First World War had indeed been raised. Only not by any Romanian Chief of Staff but by an American journalist.[xxv] And not in 1989 but in 1944. And no Hungarian territory was claimed or borders questioned. Meanwhile, some senior Hungarian officials were campaigning for portions of Romania to be made autonomous from it.[xxvi]

·      Troop re-deployments towards the Hungarian-Romanian frontier were indeed observed during 1989. But they came not from within Romania.[xxvii] On the contrary, and denials from Budapest notwithstanding, both Hungarian and Soviet troops were being redeployed to the Hungarian border with Romania.[xxviii]

·      Nuclear weapons indeed had been proliferated to Eastern Europe, only not to Romania. Ceauşescu’s repeated declarations of an ability to “produce anything, even nuclear devices” since the 1970s (notably in 1983, 1984, 1988 and 1989) were uniformly completed with restatements of Romanian policy “firmly opposed to nuclear weapons.”[xxix] Although Budapest portrayed Romania as a nuclear threat, it was Hungary and not Romania that actually had nuclear weapons on its territory.[xxx]

Pointing out that it was “not Hungary’s military leaders who are expressing concern, but its civilian party leaders” – and its reformist leaders at that – one Radio Free Europe analyst suggested that the leadership in Budapest may have been motivated to make allegations of such “questionable pertinence and even accuracy” either “as a means of discrediting Ceauşescu further” or “in an attempt to overcome division in Hungarian society and gain popular support on nationalist grounds” by manufacturing a Romanian threat.[xxxi] Not considered was the possibility that the projection of Romania as an imminent threat to Hungarian and European security would also serve to justify pre-emptive military operations against it, and pre-judge subsequent violence and military action in the area as of Romanian inspiration and provocation.[xxxii]

The tendency to analyze military developments around Romanian frontiers with little or no regard to Romania itself steadily became the norm at the end of the Cold War, usually based on arguments of strategic inconsequence and lack of Soviet concern. Thus, for example, the building of a Soviet wide-gauge railway in eastern Hungary during the mid 1980s hardly raised eyebrows in the West and (based on declassified assessments as of this writing) was never analyzed in reference to its possible impact on Romanian security.[xxxiii] Whether or not it was intended as such, the wide-gauge railway permitted rapid deployments directly from the USSR to areas near the Hungarian-Romanian border without requiring any mobilization of the Soviet Southern Group of Forces already stationed in Hungary, which were closely monitored by U.S. technical means.[xxxiv] And Moscow would not have had to force a crossing of the Soviet-Romanian frontier if it had deemed an intervention necessary. 
         Western analysts remained dismissive of any operational intent behind troop movements and re-deployments within Hungary, viewing them almost exclusively as an artifact of rapprochement with Austria, with which Budapest’s relations had been excellent for more than a decade.[xxxv]  Nor was the possibility seriously considered that the ostentatious nature of the “zone of peace” campaign may have been designed, in part, to distract attention from other developments damaging to the Pact-wide portrayal of Romania as a dangerous rogue state.

Foreign Ministers Gyula Horn and Alois Mock cutting the
barbed wire at the Austro-Hungarian border, June 1989

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[i] Szűrös interview by Ratesh in Shafir (1989a), pp. 5-6; Douglas Clarke, “The Romanian Military Threat to Hungary,” RAD Background Report/130, RFER, 27 July 1989b, OSA, Box 143, Folder 4, Report 53, pp. 1-6; Devlin (1989), pp. 1-2; Clarke (1989b), pp. 1-8.

[ii] Soviet troops formally began their partial withdrawal from Hungary on 25 April 1989 in view of invited foreign journalists and “Hungarian-born representative of the Italian parliament, Ilona Staller.” Jeremy King, “The Partial Soviet Troop Withdrawal From Hungary,” RAD Background Report/166, RFER, 11 September 1989, p. 3. Of passing interest regarding this orchestration, Staller, an adult film star better known as “Cicciolina,” claims to have been recruited by Hungarian intelligence. APN New Archives, 29 January 1998, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1999/Porn-Queen-Was-a-Communist-Spy/id-0f5c185abfb46ef9b6f28a672426e241.

[iii] Writing in January 1989, one analyst noted that: “In reality, the chance of Hungary coming to blows with its socialist ally and neighbor Romania is greater today” than any offensive against Austria, Yugoslavia or NATO. David Clarke, “The USSR Cannot Expect Greater Military Efforts from Hungary,” RAD Background Report/13, RFER, 27 January 1989a, OSA, Box 120, Folder 2, Report 135, p. 2. At the start of the decade another analyst noted that the Hungarian Army would be most enthusiastic in a fight against Romania, and that the most likely scenario for the employment of the Hungarian army in an East-West conflict was “against Romania as a pressure point and a threat vis-à-vis Transylvania.” Istvan Volgyes, “Hungary,” in Daniel N. Nelson, editor, Soviet Allies: The Warsaw Pact and the Issue of Reliability, Boulder, Westview, 1984, p. 214.

[iv] See General Kárpáti’s interview on Radio Budapest, 0645 hrs, 1 July 1989; Clarke (1989a), p. 8.

[v] See e.g. MTI in English, 12 June 1989; Clarke (1989a), p. 8, footnote 15; Jeremy King (1989), p. 3.

[vi] Zoltan D. Barany, Soldiers and Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945-90: The Case of Hungary, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 145. Many of those troops were deployed to the Eastern half of Hungary, towards Romania. Budapest and Moscow were similarly good at masking Soviet nuclear missile deployments in Hungary, of which only a handful of Hungarian Communist leaders were informed.

[vii] Douglas Clarke, “The USSR Cannot Expect Greater Military Efforts from Hungary,” RAD Background Report/13, RFER, 27 January 1989, OSA, Box 120, Folder 2, Report 135, p. 1.

[viii] Ibid. For the more accurate reports see e.g. David C. Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army, 2^nd edition, London, Jane’s Publishing, 1988, pp. 124-129.

[ix] See e.g. the Bulgarian intelligence report on the successful misleading of Western attachés through a counterintelligence Operation THUNDERBOLT (MULNIA) during the massive RHODOPE (RHODOPI) exercises near the Romanian border in 1967 in Jordan Baev, “The Communist Balkans Against NATO In The Eastern Mediterranean Area. 1949-1969,” paper presented at the conference, “The Cold War in the Mediterranean,” Cortona, 5-6 October 2001, pp. 9-10, Journal of History, International Relations and Security, http://documents.mx/documents/baev1.html; Bulgarian Archive of the Ministry of Interior (AMVR), Fond 1, Opis 10, File 258, pp. 112-138.

[x] Aboimov interview with Marina Kalashnikova, “The Country’s Leadership Regarded the GDR as Self-Supporting Unit,” Vlast (Moscow), 26 April 2005, www.kommersant.com. See also “Communique Published” in JPRS ARMS CONTROL, JPRS-TAC-89-029, 19 July 1989, p. 14; Pravda, 9 July 1989. Hungarian President Mátyás Szűrös’s announcement of his country’s support for the “autonomy” and “independence” of Transylvania in the midst of the revolution appears to confirm Aboimov. Arpad Zengo interview with Szűrös on Budapest domestic radio, 20 December 1989, 0545 hrs GMT, in FBIS-EEU-89-243, 20 December 1989, p. 47.

[xi] Aboimov was a Hungarian specialist when named to the post of Warsaw Pact Secretary General in 1989 and afterwards served as Soviet/Russian ambassador to Hungary (and later, to Ukraine). Interestingly, the first professional Soviet diplomat appointed ambassador to post-revolution Romania was also a non-Romanian speaking Hungarian specialist who served with Aboimov in Budapest during the late 1970s. “New Soviet Ambassadors Profiled,” New Times (Moscow), no. 16, 1-7 May 1990, pp. 44-45 in JPRS-UIA-90-009, 5 June 1990, pp. 1-2.

[xii] Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, p. 133.

[xiii] Likewise, on 1 December 1989, Hungarian Prime Minster Miklos Nemeth publicly announced that “a major proportion of the armed forces is to be regrouped from the western part of the country,” which suggested, as one RFE analyst noted, “that troops will be transferred to the Romanian border.” Zoltan Barany, “Major Reorganization of Hungary’s Military Establishment,” RAD Background Report/230, RFER, 28 December 1989, p. 5, OSA, Box 37, Folder 6, Report 191. The same analyst noted that over “the last two years, Hungarians have been concerned not about potential invasion from the West but about a conflict in the southeast,” with Romania. Op. cit., p. 4.

[xiv] The partial exceptions being short-term deception during tactical operations and long-term incremental deception such as the slow concealed build-up of forces. For a detailed discussion of this see Cynthia M. Grabo, “Soviet Deception in the Czechoslovak Crisis: A Study in Perspective,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 1970), pp. 20-21. See also Cynthia M. Grabo, Anticipating Surprise: Analysis of Strategic Warning, Washington D.C., Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, National Intelligence University, 2002, chapter 7.

[xv] Clarke (1989b), p. 3.

[xvi] See the article of Ion Ardelean in Lupta Intregului Popor (Bucharest), no. 4, 1988. The ethnic Romanian presence in Hungary diminished from an official 160,000 after the war to some 22,000 by the 1970s, with no corresponding out-migration to account for that decline.

[xvii] The article cited the observation that Romanian settlements “were left on Hungary’s territory” from a 1944 publication by American journalist Milton Lehrer, Ardealul: Pământ Românescu (Problema ardealului văzuta de un American) [Transylvania: A Romanian Land (The Problem of Transylvania as Seen by an American)], Bucharest, 1944. See also, Milton Lehrer, Transylvania: History and Reality, Silver Springs, MD, Bartelby Press, 1986. See also Clarke (1989b), p. 3.

[xviii] John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe, New York, Charles Scribner & Sons, 1916, pp. 302-308.

[xix] Szűrös interview by Ratesh in Shafir (1989a), p. 5.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Ibid; Clarke (1989b), p. 7. Szűrös likewise stressed “that Romanian troops had been in Budapest twice in this century, whereas Hungarian troops had never been in Bucharest,” and that “the first time Romanian troops entered Budapest, they were helping ‘suppress’ the Hungarian Soviet Republic” of Bela Kun (an action of which Szűrös evidently disapproved). According to Szűrös, the Romanians were dangerously unpredictable in their international behavior such that “anything is possible.”  In point of fact, Hungarian military personnel belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Army had been in Bucharest along with German forces – as part of the Central Power alliance against the Entente – during the two-year occupation of most of Romania in the First World War.

[xxii] Kamm (1989); Clarke (1989b), p. 3. Gyula Horn reiterated these claims on Radio Budapest, 0645 hrs, 26 July 1989.

[xxiii] Clarke (1989b), pp. 1-6 and Devlin (1989), pp. 1-2.

[xxiv] Szűrös interview by Ratesh in Shafir (1989a), pp. 5-6; Clarke (1989b), OSA, Box 143, Folder 4, Report 53, pp. 1-6; Devlin (1989), pp. 1-2. Douglas Clarke examined each of the military threat allegations and found them baseless. Clarke (1989b), pp. 1-8. It is noteworthy that these accusations were made publicly by the leaders of reform in Hungary. Thus, they were made by persons of the highest credibility, enjoying the greatest access to senior leadership in the United States and Western Europe (i.e. Mátyás Szűrös, Gyula Horn, Imre Poszgay and Csaba Tabadji). Szűrös, Horn and Tabadji all worked in the HSWP CC International Department at the time. In the late 1990s, shortly before Hungary's NATO accession, Szűrös and Horn were forced to resign from government service because of inappropriate ties with the (presumably Soviet) intelligence services. See Zsofia Szilagyi, "Ex-Judge: Top Hungarian Socialist Leaders Were Former 'Agents'," RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 1, no. 188, part II, September 27, 1996; M.S.Z., "Hungarian Screening Panel Calls for Speaker's Resignation," RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 1, no. 164, part II,  November 20, 1997; and M.S.Z., "Hungarian Socialist Deputy Urged to Resign," RFE/RL Newsline, vol. 1, no. 168, part II, November 26, 1997. 

[xxv] Indeed, the only military connection was that the 1988 journal was published by the defense ministry.

[xxvi] Szűrös interview by Ratesh in Shafir (1989a), p. 5. See also the Szűrös interview by Arpad Zengo on Budapest domestic radio, 20 December 1989, 0545 hrs GMT, in FBIS-EEU-89-243, 20 December 1989, p. 47

[xxvii] King (1989), p. 3; Clarke (1989c), p. 2.

[xxviii] For Hungarian denials see Radio Budapest, 0645 hrs, 1 July 1989; General Kárpáti’s interview on Radio Budapest, 0645 hrs, 1 July 1989; Clarke (1989a), p. 8 and footnote 15; MTI (Budapest) in English, 12 June 1989. As noted, the possibility of a Hungarian-Romanian military clash was openly discussed in the international media by the beginning of 1989. Clarke (1989a), p. 2. See also Barany (1989), p. 4.

[xxix] Radio Bucharest, 14 April 1989, 9:00 P.M. See also Romania Situation Report/4, Radio Free Europe Research, 4 May 1989, item 4; Clarke (1989b), p. 3.

[xxx] Douglas Clarke, “Hungary Proposes Border Security Zones,” RAD Background Report/181, RFER, 27 September 1989c, pp. 3-4, OSA, Box 37, Folder 6, Report 146; Henry Kamm, “Hungary Cites Military Threat from Romania,” The New York Times, 11 July 1989; Socor (1989), item 4. Szűrös’s claim that Ceauşescu was engaging in nuclear “blackmail” was hardly credible given Romania’s lack of nuclear weapons. See Szűrös interview by Ratesh in Shafir (1989a), p. 5. For allegations of the Romanian nuclear “threat” in 1988 see Mátyás Szűrös in Reuter (Budapest), 15 November 1988 and Istvan Csurka in Hitel (Budapest), December 14, 1988.

[xxxi] Clarke (1989b), p. 6. Clarke noted that the frequent comments by Hungarian authorities ostentatiously insisting on downplaying or denying any Romanian threat in fact served the opposite purpose of emphasizing it, using a “of course…but then…” approach. As Clarke noted, “none of the three threats enumerated by Horn” during his July 10, July 15 and July 26 public statements were “very convincing,” nor were they any more convincing when Imre Poszgay and Csaba Tabajdi made them in mid-June, or when Mátyás Szűrös repeated them on 19 July. Clarke (1989b), pp. 5-6.

[xxxii] During the 1930s the Soviet Front Bessarabian Societies had as one of their primary missions that of persuading American and European public opinion that Romania was an “aggressive encampment” and that Soviet military intervention against it would also serve humanitarian purposes. The 1970s and 1980s campaign falsely depicting Romania as engaged in “ethnocide” and “cultural genocide” also served this purpose, although the solution advocated was international (i.e. UN or Warsaw Pact) rather than purely Hungarian intervention.

[xxxiii] King (1989), p. 7. For the Soviet military railroad in Eastern Hungary see Allgemeine Schweizerische Militärzeitschrift, September 1984, p. 483; and Österrelchische Militärische Zeitschrift, May 1984, p. 473.

[xxxiv] King (1989), p. 7.

[xxxv] As one analyst phrased it, “some Soviet troops are redeploying from Hungary’s Austrian frontier to bases near Romania, but the changes hardly seem connected with any Romanian threat, in line with the creation of a so-called ‘zone of peace’ along the Austrian border.” See e.g. Clarke (1989a), p. 8, footnote 15. Another analyst noted that the declaration of the Hungarian Prime Minister that troops would re-deploy from the Austrian border suggested “that troops will be transferred to the Romanian border,” but concluded that “it is more likely that the remark is a sign of friendship toward Austria.” Barany (1989), p. 5.  Vienna, which had long-standing and profound ties to Hungary, also had arguably better relations with Moscow and the Soviet loyalist allies than did Bucharest.