Although the inevitable traces of liberal cluelessness (‘Soviet despot’, &c.) make this book less pleasant to read, in terms of noncommunist analyses of the Warsaw Pact this may well be the maturest one that you’ll find (in English). For example:

Dissent within the alliance took place at various levels. In the early 1960s it mainly emerged in the bilateral relations between the Kremlin and an NSWP member, thus serving NSWP emancipation. Later in the 1960s the bilateral tensions were gradually absorbed into the structure of the Warsaw Pact. With the absorption of dissent within the WP itself, the influence of the Soviet Union diminished, and that of the NSWP members grew. This book serves to assess the extent to which decision making within the WP thus became more multilateral, as well as the extent to which the alliance transcended the already existing bilateral ties between the Soviet Union and its so-called ‘satellites’. This process will be called ‘multilateralisation’, and will be used to explain the evolution of the WP as a whole from a Soviet transmission belt into an alliance in its own right.

Even the Soviet intervention in the HPR looks—at least relatively speaking—surprisingly reasonable:

Since Khrushchev’s desire for a further demilitarisation of the Cold War had been genuine, he embarked on a very quick tour of Eastern Europe on 2 November in order to legitimise the intervention. Within one day the Chinese, Czechoslovakians, Romanians, Poles and even the Yugoslavs rallied behind Khrushchev. The communist leaders fully realised that the loss of Hungary would weaken the communist bloc, which would threaten their own security too. Khrushchev’s travels prove that he sought a justification for what could otherwise have been regarded as Soviet imperialism; with Eastern European consent it turned into the salvation of communism instead. Moreover, Tito managed to convince Khrushchev against the wishes of some of his Soviet comrades to allow Kadar to form the new Hungarian government, and accordingly had some stake in Hungarian affairs after all. Moscow did indeed call the shots, but the Eastern European assistance in pulling the trigger strengthened its cause.