[SHWI] Was a "Finlandized" Warsaw Pact ever possible?

[rfmcdonald]

Over at soc.history.what-if, I put that question to the group. I remember reading, in some of Timothy Garton Ash's writings from the 1980s, about central European dissidents who hoped that their countries might one day graduate to Finland's position, enjoying near-complete domestic autonomy with only a few foreign-policy constraints. My thinking, and that of the group, seems to be that this was impossible for the simple reason that liberalized Communisms would quickly transform themselves out of existence without Soviet military threats (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981, the Baltic States in the late 1980s). In this thread, there's also an interesting side discussion regarding the viability of an independent and democratic East German republic if reunification is prevented, somehow.