By the mid-1980s it was clear that Europe's future was very much dependent upon what direction the Cold War would take. US President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) took a hardline approach to relations with the Soviet Union, calling the USSR an "evil empire," accusing it of seeking global hegemony. The US would openly support anti-Communist “freedom fighters” opposed to the Soviets or Soviet-backed regimes in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, San Salvador, Angola, and Ethiopia. And, the US would build up its military forces and strategic capabilities. The Soviet Union took a hardline response, by breaking off nuclear arms talks with the US and building up its intermediary missile forces in Eastern Europe. In the Kremlin, the old men who ruled the USSR remained entrenched in preserving the stagnating Stalinist economic system then severely strained by the burden of spending on armaments. The Cold War seemed to be heating up. Then came Mikhail Gorbachev.
Coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev stunned both the Soviet Union and the world. The old ways of doing things were not working. The Soviet Union needed new direction. It needed reform. Calling his polices "openness," "restructuring," and "democratization," Gorbachev would relax and even end state-controls on Soviet life and call for "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy. The implementation of Gorbachev's reforms was not easy. Hardliners accused him of undermining Marxist-Leninism and endangering Soviet security; reformers accused him of not going far enough. But, the Soviet Union was on an irreversible march of change. Without Soviet oversight and controls, Communism in Eastern Europe was repudiated. In 1989 Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania all threw off the Communist yoke they had worn since the 1940s and formed democratic governments. In December 1989 US President Bush met with Gorbachev in Malta and together they declared the Cold War over. The proof that it was over lay in what happened in 1990: Germany was reunited.
As these momentous events were taking place, the USSR began to implode. The forces of reform stirred separatist sentiments in the Soviet Baltic republics. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declared themselves independent in 1990. Democratic elections held throughout the USSR created new governments in Russia and Ukraine that declared themselves "sovereign." Gorbachev attempted to hold the union together by proposing a new Union Treaty, but his effectiveness as a leader was severely weakened by a coup attempt in August 1991. In December 1991, the Soviet Union as a state dissolved. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared themselves independent and the remaining constituent republics did likewise. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev resigned.
Section 29.1 The Soviet Union under Gorbachev
Section 29.2 The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe
Section 29.3 The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Section 29.4 Cold War Chronology: 1985-1991