The Final Thaw

Aging Soviet leadership led to a rapid succession of the last Stalinist-era leaders. Brezhnev's 1982 death was followed by the ascension of Yuri Andropov, and, in 1984, of Konstantin Chernenko, who died the following year. Finally, a young new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, implemented two initiatives that inadvertently began unraveling the U.S.S.R. He recognized that the aging heavy industry and totalitarian state structure implemented by Stalin was weighing down the Soviet Union and directed the implementation of perestroika (“restructuring”) to orient the U.S.S.R. toward a market economy. A parallel initiative, glasnost (“openness”), sought open discussion of both current problems and the darker periods of Soviet history. Gorbachev's and Reagan's 1986 summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, brought the two leaders closer together but failed to produce an agreement. The following year, however, the two countries signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which withdrew both the Pershing IIs and SS-20s from Europe. The two nations began negotiations over strategic arms reduction and the limitation of conventional forces in Europe.

The warming in U.S.–U.S.S.R. relations and new openness in the U.S.S.R. encouraged dissent in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine, which called for the use of military force to stabilize satellite nations. When the Hungarian government initiated reforms that led to a multiparty election, the Red Army did not intervene. The Polish “Solidarity” trade union, which had been brutally suppressed in 1981 by the Soviet-sponsored Polish government, won open elections in 1989, making it the first noncommunist government in Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. East Germans, stirred by their neighbors' examples, marched in the streets demanding an end to the most visible symbol of the Cold War—the Berlin Wall. When Gorbachev refused to save the East German regime, a rapid change of government led to the opening of border crossings on November 9, 1989. Communist governments in the remainder of Eastern Europe fell to popular movements by early 1990. The reunification of Germany that year marked the end of divided Europe.

The collapse of the Soviet's Eastern European empire, the failure of perestroika and glasnost to serve Gorbachev's objective of making communist leadership more appealing to the Soviet people, and the restless stirring of nationalist feeling within the Soviet Union itself completed the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. within a year. The Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), conquered by Stalin and absorbed into the U.S.S.R. in 1940, sought freedom. Other regions and ethnic groups followed their example. This disintegration, and Gorbachev's unwillingness to use force to suppress it, inspired an August 1991 hard-line coup attempt. Gorbachev survived, but only when Russian nationalist forces, under Boris Yeltsin's direction, came to the regime's rescue. The secession of major components of the U.S.S.R., including the Ukraine and Belarus, sealed the Soviet Union's fate. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War thawed. The United States, the residual Russian Federation, and the re-created Ukraine entered into a process of significant reduction in nuclear weapons.

Further Readings

Entry Citation:

"Cold War." Encyclopedia of War & American Society. 2005. SAGE Publications. 1 May. 2010. <http://www.sage-ereference.com/war/Article_n65.html>.

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