Reasons for the end of the cold war

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Reasons for the end of the cold war

J. Gower

Throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Union fought an increasingly frustrating war in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Soviet economy faced the continuously escalating costs of the arms race. Dissent at home grew while the stagnant economy faltered under the combined burden. Attempted reforms at home left the Soviet Union unwilling to rebuff challenges to its control in Eastern Europe. During 1989 and 1990, the Berlin Wall came down, borders opened, and free elections ousted Communist regimes everywhere in eastern Europe. In late 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved into its component republics. With stunning speed, the Iron Curtain was lifted and the Cold War came to an end.

The most important long-term reason was communism's inability to achieve anything other than a totalitarian system that supported repression, exploitation, and often murder or imprisonment of the people by a tiny well-organized elite that enjoyed what little wealth and privilege the system produced. At worst, as in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, to name a few, communism resulted in genocide. State ownership and planning of the entire economy failed, often tragically, to achieve sustained economic development. The massive industrialization efforts of communist states contributed little to development or wealth. Central planning failed to create dynamic, profitable industries, infrastructure, or agriculture. Instead, what happened in every communist country was a tremendous misallocation or waste of human, natural, technology, and financial resources. Soviet statistics about becoming the world's largest producers of steel, for example, were often grossly inflated and actual production often grossly misallocated. Virtually none of the former Soviet Union's industries are competitive with foreign industries. By emphasizing the distribution rather than the creation of income and wealth, the communists have merely succeeded in making more people poor. Although the communist systems did achieve significant gains in literacy, health care, and safety, these gains could not balance the system's economic failings. Meanwhile the democratic industrial nations forged further ahead economically.
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Communism's collapse was accelerated by America's containment policy. If Soviet-backed communist parties had taken power in the industrial powerhouses of western Europe and Japan, communism's demise would have been delayed immeasurably as those geo-economically strategic regions became communist, rather than liberal democratic, showcases.

The short-term reason for the end of the cold war, was democratic revolutions that swept eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. He understood that central planning had failed to achieve prosperity or equality. By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union could no longer afford to maintain its eastern European empire, its ...

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