I've been reading up on the Polish military and how they were, at least up until Stalin's death, forced to use Russian designed weapons. This got me wondering, how did the Eastern Bloc actually function internally?
Were the countries that weren't the USSR simply puppets, that had absolutely no say in anything whatsoever?
Ceausescu, surprisingly, had a reputation for "going rogue" compared to other Warsaw Pact leaders. He came to power as a critic of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, made many business deals with Western countries, and privately feared invasion by the USSR. Romania even defied the Soviet-led boycott and sent a team to the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Hungary in the 1980s was somewhat more Western-oriented than other Communist countries, symbolized by the Formula One race it hosted starting in 1986. Budapest even had a McDonald's a few years before Moscow did.
When the end was near, East Germany's Erich Honnecker repeatedly clashed with Gorbachev on domestic and foreign-policy issues - this time with the "puppet" state taking the harder line.