The End of the Cold War

By the 1980s the Soviet Union was straining under a stagnant economy, a costly arms race, and a war in Afghanistan it could not win. Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985, tried to save the system with two reforms. Glasnost, meaning openness, allowed criticism of the government and freer speech and press. Perestroika restructured the rigid command economy toward limited market mechanisms. Neither was meant to end communism. Instead, glasnost gave people the words and nerve to voice decades of frustration, while perestroika disrupted the economy without quickly fixing it. Once Gorbachev also signaled he would not use Soviet troops to prop up allied governments, the dominoes in Eastern Europe had nothing holding them up.

1989 proved it. Poland held partly free elections in June and a Solidarity-led government took power. Hungary opened its border with Austria in the fall, letting East Germans flee west. East Germany's government collapsed as crowds tore down the Berlin Wall in November. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution removed its communist leadership within weeks, almost entirely without violence. These regimes fell fast because they had already lost the will and the backing to crush dissent by force.

The Soviet Union itself unraveled next. Nationalist movements in republics like the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Georgia pushed for independence. A failed hardline coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 discredited the old guard and boosted reformer Boris Yeltsin. By December 1991 the Soviet Union formally dissolved into fifteen separate states, closing the Cold War and opening the uncertain post-Cold War world covered next in the period.