Cold War 1962-1991: Encyclopedia II - Cold War 1962-1991 - The end of the Cold War

Cold War 1962-1991 - The end of the Cold War

While the Soviets had enjoyed great achievements on the international stage before Reagan entered office in 1981, such as the unification of their communist ally, Vietnam (1976), and a string of communist revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the country's strengthening ties with Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s only masked weakness in economic terms next to the United States. In 1981, the Warsaw Pact ran the military exercise Zapad, a massive show of numerical strength, but masking political instability in Poland.

The Soviet economy suffered severe structural problems. Reform stalled between 1964-1982 and supply shortages of consumer goods became increasingly widespread. The 1980s saw weak leadership in the Soviet Union. In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died to be replaced by the short-lived Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko who also quickly died.

East-West tensions eased rapidly after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three elderly Soviet leaders in a row since 1982, the Politburo elected Gorbachev Soviet Communist Party chief in 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young reform-oriented technocrats, who had begun their careers in the heyday of "de-Stalinization" under reformist leader Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), rapidly consolidated power, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.

On October 11, 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavík, Iceland, in an effort to continue discussions about scaling back their intermediate missile arsenals in Europe. The talks broke down in failure. Afterwards, Soviet policymakers increasingly accepted Reagan administration warnings that the U.S. would make the arms race a huge burden for them. The twin burdens of the Cold War arms race on one hand, and the provision of large sums of foreign and military aid, which their socialist allies had grown to expect, possibly left Gorbachev's efforts to boost production of consumer goods and reform the stagnating economy all but impossible.

The result in was a dual approach of cooperation with the west and economic restructuring (perestroika) and democratization (glasnost) domestically, which eventually made it impossible for Gorbachev to reassert central control and influence over Warsaw Pact member states. Reaganite hawks have since argued that pressures stemming from increased U.S. defense spending was an additional impetus for reform.

While the aging Eastern European leaders kept their states in the grip of "normalization", Gorbachev's reformist policies in the Soviet Union exposed how a once revolutionary Communist Party had become moribund at the very centre of the system. By the spring of 1989, the USSR had not only experienced lively media debate, but had also held its first multi-candidate elections. For the first time in recent history, the force of liberalization was spreading from East to West.

As Gorbachev-inspired waves of reform propagated throughout the Eastern bloc, grassroots organizations, such Poland's Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground. In 1989, the Communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first to negotiate the organization of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protests unseated Communist leaders. The Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case, during a violent uprising. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 symbolized the fall of Eastern European Communist governments and the end of the Iron Curtain divide.

The collapse of the Eastern European Communist governments with Gorbachev's tacit consent inadvertently encouraged several Soviet republics to seek greater independence from Moscow's rule. Agitation in the Baltic States for independence lead to first Lithuania and then Estonia and Latvia declaring independence. Disaffection in the other republics were met by promises of greater decentralization. More open elections lead to the election of candidates opposed to Communist Party rule.

In an attempt to halt the rapid changes to the system, a group of Soviet hard-liners represented by Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev launched a coup overthrowing Gorbachev in August 1991. Russian President Boris Yeltsin rallied the people and much of the army against the coup and the effort collapsed. Although restored to power, Gorbachev's authority had been irreparably undermined. In September, the Baltic states were granted independence. On December 1, Ukraine withdrew from the USSR. On December 31, 1991 the USSR officially dissolved, breaking up into fifteen separate nations. The last chapter of the Cold War was over.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The end of the Cold War", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki