MOSCOW -- The Warsaw Pact, the 35-year-old Soviet-led military alliance set up to counter NATO, passed out of existence Sunday in a simple ceremony in the Soviet capital.
'Commander in chief of the Warsaw Treaty united armed forces Pyotr Lushev and chief of staff Vladimir Lobov surrendered their powers,' the official Tass agency said.
With that simple formality, 'the Warsaw Treaty Military structures ended their activities today,' Tass said.
The Warsaw Pact will continue in name, but the military alliance, the original raison d'etre of the grouping, is gone. Moscow has expressed hope that bilateral ties can go on.
'I hope that our relations will develop on a bilateral basis, including the issues of security and military and technical cooperation, ' Lobov said.
He stressed the decreased level of confrontation between East and West made it possible to disband the military structures of the Warsaw Pact.
'Only under these conditions, an opportunity emerged to build a new model of European security and to map out ways for a gradual transition to a non-bloc system,' Lobov said.
The eight-nation pact had for all intents and purposes lost its reason for being last year when its East European members were allowed by Moscow to choose non-Communist rule.
The decision to disband the Warsaw Treaty military bodies and structures by March 31 was taken in Budapest, Hungary last February at a special political conference.
The multilateral military alliance was born May 14, 1955, when the Soviet Union and its then seven Eastern European satellite nations signed the Treaty of Warsaw.
The signatories were the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Albania.
East Germany, which was the lynchpin of the alliance against NATO, has itself ceased to exist as a separate state, although 300,000 Soviet soldiers remain on what is now united German soil.
The Soviet troops in Germany are to be withdrawn along with the forces from the other East European nations, and many have already left from those countries.
The end of the pact, however, has not met with universal approval by the Soviet military and political conservatives, and some of the hardliners have not been bashful about saying so.
At a major Communist Party session last year, one conservative compared Gorbachev to Shakespeare's 'King Lear,' who gave away his kingdom while still in the prime of his reign.
In his resignation speech as foreign minister on Dec. 20, Eduard Shevardnadze openly mocked the 'boys in colonels stripes' who had criticized his diplomacy of accommodation that led to the end of the Cold War.
The Warsaw Pact was once so fundamental in Soviet strategic thinking that the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 rather than allow Prague's liberal leaders to choose to leave the Warsaw Pact.
The Aug. 20, 1968, Czechoslovakia invasion was led by the Soviet Union but also included the Warsaw Pact armies of Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria.
The now discredited policy of preventing Eastern European nations from giving up socialism and Warsaw Pact membership came to be known as the 'Brezhnev Doctrine.'
