The End of the Cold War

The global Cold War between two armed camps led by the United States and the Soviet Union lasted almost half a century. In the years around 1990, however, the struggle finally ended. The muchfeared nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers never came about, but the end was as clear as any military victory. Western fears of growing Soviet power did not come true. In fact, Soviet communism was doomed. Signs of the weakness of the Soviet system had in fact been visible from the beginning. Stalin’s Soviet Union emerged from World War II as a superpower with an Eastern European sphere of influence stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans. Victory, however, brought few rewards to the Soviet people. Stalin continued to fill forced labor camps with “enemies of the state.” Under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviets enjoyed greater freedom of speech. Some government critics were freed from prisons and labor camps. Khrushchev oversaw a shift in economic priorities away from heavy industry and toward the production of consumer goods. But Khrushchev remained firmly committed to a command economy. The thaw in Moscow inspired some East Europeans to move toward greater independence. However, Khrushchev himself remained a determined cold warrior. When Hungarians tried to break free of Soviet control in 1956, Khrushchev sent tanks in to enforce obedience, and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, did the same thing when Czechs challenged the Soviets in the “Prague spring” of 1968. In 1979, the Soviet Union became involved in a long war in Afghanistan, an Islamic country just south of the Soviet Union. A Soviet-supported Afghan government had tried to modernize the nation. Its policies included social reforms and land redistribution that would reduce the power of regional landlords. Afghan landlords—who commanded armed men as warlords— and Muslim conservatives charged that both policies threatened Islamic tradition. When these warlords took up arms against the government, Soviet troops moved in.