During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off with thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fly. The world was at the brink of disaster. After it was over, nobody wanted another incident like it. The tension between the great nuclear powers had to be toned down a bit. Towards the end of the 1960’s. Both sides had even more reason for wanting better relations. The Vietnam War had been a PR nightmare for the US, they wanted to make sure something like it never happened again. The Soviets meanwhile had fallen out with the the Chinese, their former allies. They now had another unfriendly nuclear power to worry about. So during the 70’s the US and the USSR embarked on a period of “detente”. They held regular summits, went into space together and signed arms control treaties. They tried to get along. All while taking the opportunity to modernise their nuclear arsenals. Co-existance secured by Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviets however, had a problem.. They were already over-invested in weapons, but the nuclear stockpile just wouldn’t stop growing. The Soviet Union had become a massive corruption-riddled bureaucracy, ruled by an ineffective clique of old men. For many government and party bureaucrats: Personal power and privileges depended on the military sector… and so spending got more and more out of control. This, combined with fundamental flaws in the planned economy, caused the Soviet Union to enter an era of stagnation. Despite this, in 1979, they deployed troops to Afghanistan to set up a puppet government. In response, US President Jimmy Carter, raised military spending and led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Détente, was over. The following year, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter and became president, he rejected the idea of détente and started working with other anti-communist leaders to put pressure on the Soviet Union and make the Cold War winnable. Knowing that the Soviets couldn’t afford another arms race, the Reagan administration initiated one. They raised the military budget even more and started funding the research of advanced new weapons and anti-weapon systems that could challenge the notion of “Mutually assured destruction”. They committed to “rolling back” communist governments around the world by helping rebel groups fight them. Some of these groups were.. controversial.. But thanks to one of them, Afghanistan would soon turn into the Soviet Union’s version of Vietnam. Reagan called The Soviet Union “An Evil Empire” and predicted that marxism would end up “On the ash heap of History” The Soviet leadership took this harsh rhetoric a bit too literally. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chief Yuri Andropov became convinced that the Americans were planning a surprise nuclear first strike. This led to a couple of “nuclear close calls” during this time, but it all, obviously, ended up ok. By 1985, Brezhnev had died, been succeeded by Andropov, who also had died and been succeeded by Chernenko.. who then also died. And so Mikhail Gorbachev became leader, he was, at 54, young compared to his predecessors. He was seen as the leader of a new generation. As the first Soviet leader to do so, he admitted that they had a problem with corruption and the economy. To deal with this he made his famous reforms: They meant increased freedom of the press and transparency of government. They Loosened the states’s grip on the economy and introduced elements of democracy to the system. Gorbachev didn’t want to replace the socialist system, only reform it to make it work in the modern age. The plan was to encourage criticism from the people, in order to root out corruption and get the economy back on track. Either way, President Reagan saw that Gorbachev was different from his predecessors, and they agreed to resume talks. These talks culminated in the signing of the INF treaty, drastically reducing each countries nuclear arsenal. Over the next few years tensions between the super powers dropped significantly. But Reagan and the US kept up the diplomatic pressure: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” *Applause* The reforms where doing what they were supposed to do: encourage criticism of the system. Both in the Soviet Union and in it’s Eastern European Satellite states. In Poland, The anti-communist “Solidarity” movement had led protests and strikes for a decade and by now had forced the Polish Communist Party to abandon it’s monopoly on power. A partially free election was held. Solidarity performed better than anyone expected. The communist party had intended to make small concessions to the protestors, but ended up losing much of their legitimacy and after a bit of side-switching, a non-communist prime minister was inbound. People wondered whether Soviet tanks would come rolling across the border as they always had before. However, Gorbachev refused to hold on to his empire by force. This became the push on the first domino: One by one the satellite governments fell. Communist rule came to a non-violent end in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. And a very violent one in Romania. The Berlin Wall, the symbol of the divided Europe was torn down and soon the two Germanys were reunited. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, the Gorbachev-reforms had allowed suppressed nationalism to awake in the many Republics that made up the Union. Gorbachev had tried appeasing the people by allowing republics to elect their own leaders. This had not only failed, but also loosened the communist party’s iron grip over the land. To top things off: Gorbachev’s economic reforms had failed to save the collapsing economy. Riots and protests broke out, Republics started declaring their independence. In the chaos, Gorbachev tried to keep the union together. He proposed a looser union with great autonomy to the republics. But it was all in vain: In the summer of ’91, a coup attempt took place where the “old school communists” who opposed reforms, tried to take power. Gorbachev was stuck in house arrest while the newly elected leader of the Russian Soviet Republic: Boris Yeltsin, ordered the coup-makers arrested and the army sided with him. The coup failed but Gorbachev lost what was left of his his legitimacy as a leader: The popular Boris Yeltsin and the other leaders of the republics soon declared themselves independent states and on December 21st 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. People around the world were shocked, in little more than two years the entire eastern bloc had gone up in smoke. The Russian Republic remained, a shadow of it’s former self. Whether you give credit to Reagan, Gorbachev, or the Soviet Economic System. The United States was left as the world's only superpower, marxism had, as Reagan predicted, been left on the ash heap of history. At least for the most part.. The End