The End of the Cold War

The Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Russia and more broadly, between the industrialized West and the Communist bloc, is considered to have begun virtually as the last shot was fired in the WWII European theater and to have ended in 1989 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many consider the end of the Cold War to have been during the short period in mid-1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the nations of its Eastern European empire gained independence (which they had had in name only since 1945). However, the actual process of the end of the Cold War spanned almost the entire decade of the 1980s.

In May 1945, Soviet armies had overrun Eastern Europe and defeated Nazi Germany. The Western allies had been allies of Russia as well, but this ceased to be almost immediately. It soon became readily apparent that Stalin regarded Eastern Europe as war booty and intended to absorb all of its nations into the Russian empire. The Western allies were outraged at this, as they felt they had not liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny only to see it fall victim to a new form of totalitarian oppression. Yet, only the United States had any stomach whatsoever for fighting, and Stalin knew this.

As it became more and more evident that the “Uncle Joe Stalin” of wartime days was actually a bloodthirsty, paranoid megalomaniac, postwar strategy shifted to one of “containment”; to basically concede the captive lands of Eastern Europe to Stalin and try to stop communism’s expansion into nations that were still free. Many in the U.S. saw that containment had come too little, too late. The destruction of Nazi Germany had created a power vacuum into which Stalin’s Russia had hastily stepped. In his seminal work on the Cold War, “Strategies of Containment,” John Gaddis noted that in 1941, Harry S. Truman, later to become America’s first Cold War president, had foreseen this all too clearly: “Truman had suggested…’If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and in that way help them to kill as many as possible.’ …he unexpectedly entered the White House four years later. By that time, and with increasing frequency in the months that followed, questions were being raised as to whether the United States had relied too heavily on the Russians too heavily to defeat the Germans too thoroughly” (Gaddis 4-5). Many wondered just how much of an improvement it was to be fighting the Soviet Union all over the world instead of Nazi Germany in Europe (Gaddis 7). Of course, Germany had to be defeated, but its particular brand of tyranny had been replaced with something that was arguably even worse.

The policy of containment did, in fact, work to some degree as Soviet-sponsored communist revolutionary movements in Greece and Turkey in 1948 were thwarted and the Berlin blockade was broken the year after that. Russia absorbed the nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, though they remained independent nations in name. Yugoslavia, though communist, retained a fair measure of autonomy under wartime hero Josip Tito—possibly because the Russians had no stomach for fighting the fierce Yugoslav partisans that had given the Nazis so much trouble. Albania also described its own communist path. The Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were not so lucky, as they ceased to exist as countries even in name. Stalin had added eight conquered nations to the Soviet empire, and despite a fair amount of grumbling, the West soon accepted the new paradigm (Gaddis 13, 17).

The United States had a narrow window of opportunity for the four years after 1945 when it was the only nation in the world with atomic weapons. That ended in 1949 when the Soviets detonated a weapon of their own. It was now not possible to contemplate holding back the Russians by means of open warfare. The lost opportunity to blunt Soviet expansionism, even to force it to lift its boot from the neck of Eastern Europe, was very real. As Zubok, Martinovich, and Pleshakov noted in Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, “The Soviet Union…could not sustain the stress of another war. In this respect, it is hard to imagine that Stalin could have deliberately chosen to pursue brinkmanship with the West” (Zubok et al. 6-7). It is tantalizing to think that Stalin, threatened with nuclear weapons, may well have backed down. In fact, during the Berlin Airlift crisis, the U.S. moved B-29 bombers armed with atomic bombs to within striking range of Russia; Russia eventually lifted the blockade. But America was soon distracted by another huge communist nation bent on expansion and conquest: Mao’s China. With the war in Korea to be fought, America went even more on the defensive in Europe. This allowed Stalin to consolidate and, in the eyes of the world, even legitimize its empire. The Soviet Union now embarked on an active campaign of spying, destabilizing of free nations, support of communist governments worldwide, and economic warfare; in short, everything that a nation making war on another would do except for the actual shooting (Zubok et al. 27). It was “Cold” because there was no actual shooting; it was a “War” because that is exactly what it was.

In the ensuing decades, Russia did not succeed in expanding nor did the U.S. succeed in contracting the Russian sphere of influence. Cuba remained communist but was neutralized as a possible military threat and Russian outpost via the Cuban Missile Crisis. China’s two proxy wars with the U.S., in Korea and Vietnam, resulted in standoffs, with Chinese puppet states in North Korea and North Vietnam but the southern parts remaining free (though North Vietnam would soon conquer South Vietnam). This situation persisted until the ascension to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Risse-Kappen noted that Gorbachev’s twin policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring) were at the heart of the change in Soviet thinking that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet communist party and state (Risse-Kappen 1). Part of the network of causation was the much freer ability of Russian intellectuals and policymakers to have dialogues with the West. It became clear that the Soviet Union was as weary of the Cold War as the West was, perhaps even more so. There was also evidence that Russia was no longer interested in hanging on to its Eastern European satellites; the Soviet non-reaction to the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s was in marked contrast to its sending in the tanks in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1967, to crush popular uprisings in those countries.

It has become almost a cliché, but also taken as an article of faith in the United States, that Ronald Reagan pretty much singlehandedly ended the Cold War. The story goes something like this: Reagan seized the helm of state from the weak and ineffectual Jimmy Carter in 1980. America had been humiliated by the Iran hostage crisis and shown to be a paper tiger by its defeat in Vietnam and virtual non-opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan immediately embarked on a campaign of deficit spending and military expansion. His proposed Star Wars program scared the Russians half to death, and his belligerent rhetoric (“evil empire”) convinced many around the world that he would be happy to turn the Cold War into a “real” war. He then met with Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986 and subsequently gave his famous “Tear down this wall!” speech in Berlin in 1987. Unable to keep pace with America’s increased military spending and realizing it could never win the Cold War, the Soviet Union fell apart under its own internal stresses. That’s how the story is often told.

The truth of the matter is that the Cold War was ending anyway and that Reagan and Gorbachev were merely catalysts, not instigators of that end. Furthermore, of the two statesmen, Gorbachev had far more to do with the end of the Cold War than Reagan did. After all, for all of his bellicose rhetoric, Reagan was not about to launch a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. Nor did he have any real military or diplomatic leverage against Russia. The only real paradigm shift about which the Soviets could be worried was America’s increasingly friendly relations with China, which might have made the Russians feel more isolated, but they had never been on all that good terms with China anyway. The fact of the matter is that Gorbachev could easily have maintained the status quo. Russia was a creaky and leaky ship, but it still floated. Many far more dysfunctional nations than Russia in the late 1980s existed and have continued to exist. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was not a foregone conclusion by any means. Pundits like to say that the Soviet Union fell apart because of the inherent contradictions of its political and social systems. This is tautological thinking: it fell apart because it was primed to do so, and the fact that it did fall apart proved that it was inevitable.

Gorbachev was an unusual man when compared to former Soviet leaders. He was the first Soviet premier to have been born after the October Revolution. Thus, his life experience was different from those who came before him. Also, he, unlike his predecessors, had risen to power when relations with the West had already begun to thaw, with Breshnev’s “détente” initiatives in the early 70s. Gorbachev was above all a pragmatist. He realized that immense resources were being consumed in fighting the Cold War (Gorbachev and Mlynar 33, 36). He also considered the Soviet Union’s domination of other countries to be practically and morally wrong, as shown by his swift granting of independence to not only the Eastern European satellites but also the Baltic states and former “Republics of the Soviet Union” such as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics. As noted in “Conversations With Gorbachev” by Gorbachev and Mlynar, Gorbachev saw that “the system held everyone in its grip, stifling initiative. In order to protect itself, it suppressed both freedom of thought and any kind of searching or exploration” (Gorbachev and Mlynar 2). Thus, Gorbachev was a revolutionary. He grew up in an environment where the Soviet state was thoroughly entrenched but unlike Brezhev, Khruschev, Beria, etc., had not been nurtured to power in Stalin’s baths of blood. Thus, he had no particular loyalty to Soviet ideology or the Soviet state apparatus. He was intelligent enough to see that adherence to orthodoxy and doctrine had held the Soviet Union back and that its raison d’etre was obsolete.

While the Soviet Union would probably have collapsed and the Cold War ended no matter what, it would almost certainly not have done so as soon or as rapidly as it did had it not been for Mikhail Gorbachev. If any one person is responsible, he is that person. By comparison, Ronald Reagan’s role was peripheral. Rather than ending the Cold War, as many Americans see it, what Reagan did was perceive Gorbachev’s willingness to end it and then do everything in his power to make it possible for Gorbachev to do so. The signs that it might be possible to do so had started to appear in the first years of the Reagan presidency, and when Gorbachev came to power, Reagan seized the opportunity to open up a dialogue with him. But nothing significant would have happened if Gorbachev hadn’t been willing and prepared to make significant, even drastic changes. Gorbachev has been recognized for his role in ending the Cold War, including being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. While Reagan gets most of the credit in the U.S., the world and Russia itself give Gorbachev his larger and rightful share of the credit. It took far more courage for Gorbachev to oversee the drastic shrinkage of his country and the dissolution of his country’s political system than it did for Reagan to simply talk about it. Gorbachev possibly received fewer accolades than Reagan in the West because he wasn’t as well known.

Works Cited

Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of containment: a critical appraisal of American national security policy during the Cold War. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Zdenek Mlynar. Conversations with Gorbachev: on perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the crossroads of socialism. Columbia University Press, 2012.

Risse-Kappen, Thomas. "Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war." International Organization 48 (1994): 185-185.

Zubok, V. Vladislav Martinovich, and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War. Harvard University Press, 1997.