The Fading Away of the Cold War
1985 – Gorbachev tells the Eastern Bloc communist leaders that in the future Moscow would not interfere militarily to save their regimes in Europe.
October 1986 – US President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik and ease tension in US – Soviet relations.
December 1987 – Reagan and Gorbachev sign a treaty to eliminate a certain category of nuclear missiles.
February 1988 – Gorbachev announces the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan.
There has been much speculation about who actually ended the cold war. One of the favourites is the American President Ronald Reagan, who called the USSR an “evil empire” and challenged her with an arms race, which Moscow was unable economically to take up. But one can say that Reagan was lucky to be president at the time of a generational change in the USSR.
It was Gorbachev first of all who ended the Cold War. Most important was his decision to abandon the age-old Soviet precept, according to which any violence used to further the cause of a Communist utopia was justified. This was a dramatic development as the whole USSR with its “outer empire” in Europe (the Eastern Bloc) had been built on revolutionary terror. This was a dramatic development as the whole USSR with its “outer empire” in Europe (the Eastern Bloc) had been built on terror. The second significant factor was the recognition that the socialist economic model had not lived up to the expectations and Moscow had become dependent on the capitalist west.
Some scholars have praised the Cold War as the longest period of peace in history. Indeed, the so-called nuclear umbrella prevented wars between major states. But great powers did fight each other by proxy in smaller crises that affected peripheral regions (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) Most of the time these conflicts took the form of a civil war and it was more likely than not that the US and the USSR got involved.
Besides weak states outside the Western world, the Cold War victimised those nations that had fallen under the occupation of the USSR. The Cold War served to cement the geopolitical stand-off between East and West, leaving Eastern Europe and the Baltic States under Stalinist rule. For these people, Cold War meant being handed out a life sentence.
The fading away of the Cold War was thus the key for opening the prison of nations, the USSR. But no one could be certain that Moscow would leave the Cold War without giving a final, all-destructive battle.
The end of the Cold War was the result of purposeful action by Gorbachev and his team. As a first step, Moscow eased the confrontation with the US, which had applied painful economic sanctions against the USSR. The treaty signed with Reagan in 1987, which reduced the number of nuclear weapons in each state, promised savings for Moscow. As to Europe, Gorbachev proceeded from the optimistic assumption that Russia belonged historically and culturally to Europe, but, of course, Moscow also had economic interests. As a precondition to friendship, though, Gorbachev had to give up on power politics in Eastern Europe, which he agreed to do. Immediately after coming to power he told the leaders of the Eastern Bloc that he would not interfere militarily in their affairs. With this the stage for 1989, the year of miracles, had been set.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria