How did the Cold War end?

The Cold War ended not with the nuclear apocalypse many had feared, but through a largely peaceful process that few predicted — the internal collapse of the Soviet system and the democratic revolutions it could no longer suppress.

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was in serious trouble. Its command economy was stagnating while Western economies boomed. Military spending consumed a crippling share of GDP. Agricultural production could not reliably feed the population. Technological innovation — particularly in computing and communications — was falling catastrophically behind the West. The war in Afghanistan, launched in 1979, had become the Soviet Union's Vietnam — a costly, unwinnable quagmire.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985, recognized that the system needed fundamental reform. Glasnost allowed public discussion of problems that had been taboo — government failures, historical crimes, environmental disasters. Perestroika attempted to introduce market mechanisms and decentralize economic decision-making. In foreign policy, Gorbachev pursued arms reduction agreements with the United States and, crucially, signaled that the Soviet Union would no longer use military force to maintain communist governments in Eastern Europe.

This withdrawal of the Soviet security guarantee was the catalyst for revolution. In 1989, in rapid succession, communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe. Poland held semi-free elections that Solidarity won overwhelmingly. Hungary opened its borders. East Germans poured West. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution removed the communist government peacefully. Romania's revolution was violent — dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed. By the end of 1989, communist rule in Eastern Europe was finished.

The Soviet Union itself followed. Nationalist movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, and other republics gained momentum. Gorbachev's attempts to hold the union together through a new federal treaty were undermined by a failed hard-line coup in August 1991. In the coup's aftermath, Boris Yeltsin emerged as the power broker, and republic after republic declared independence. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. The Cold War was over.

The ending was remarkably peaceful given the stakes — a testament to both Gorbachev's restraint and the genuine desire for change among Eastern European populations. But the peaceful ending also meant that many of the Cold War's consequences — nuclear arsenals, regional conflicts, institutional legacies — persisted into the post-Cold War world.