Rejection of Communist Ideology and the End of the Cold War

Rejection of communist ideology in Eastern Europe certainly contributed to ending the Cold War, but Gorbachev proved to be the enabling factor. He wanted to reform communism, but his reforms caused a revolution driven from below which destroyed the communist system and ended the Soviet Empire and the Cold War due to his refusal to use force. Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika played a major role in ending the Cold War.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union during a period of economic stagnation where he recognised the inefficiency of the communist system. He wanted moderate change, such as with perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (political openness), which he believed would help to restore the legitimacy of the communist party; instead, the public became aware of its shortcomings. Russia was also losing its grip on its satellite states and ethnic groups took the opportunity to free themselves from Soviet control. Gorbachev had failed to realise that communism would be destroyed once factors like nationalism took hold and once people became more aware of economic issues. By the summer of 1989, East Europeans were given more freedom and seized the chance to reject communism. By November, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Eastern Europe’s rejection of communist ideology removed a major obstacle to the ending of the Cold War.

Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev understood that the Soviet Union could never advance economically if it continued to devote 20% of gross national product and 40% of its budget to military spending. He wanted to demilitarize Soviet foreign policy so that he could divert resources to fixing a broken economy. He needed assurances of external security and Ronald Reagan gave him those reassurances. Reagan saw that there was the prospect of changing relations with the Soviet Union. In November 1985, he first met Gorbachev in Geneva to discuss a reduction in nuclear weapons. In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster made Gorbachev realize that nuclear weapons themselves might be the ultimate enemy. Reagan, unknown to Gorbachev, shared the same view of nuclear weapons as immoral.

During the 1980s, Reagan initiated the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), an anti-ballistic missile program that was designed to shoot down nuclear missiles in space. It sought to create a space-based shield that would render nuclear missiles obsolete. At their face-to-face summit of October 1986 in Reykjavik, Reagan suggested that the two sides get rid of nuclear weapons altogether and jointly build an SDI system to guard against a nuclear revival. However, no agreement was reached, but Gorbachev was convinced that Reagan did not intend to make a first strike against the Soviet Union. Further summits took place and finally, in December 1987, they agreed the INF Treaty (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces), the first agreement to reduce nuclear weapons.

In 1987, when Reagan visited Berlin, he urged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with the words “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”. The wall came down 29 months later. When Reagan visited Moscow in 1988, a Russian journalist asked whether he still viewed the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’, a remark he had made when assuming office. Reagan replied, “No. I was talking about another time, another era”., International history, 1945–92, History Essay