Mikhail Gorbachev's Impact on Cold War and Soviet Dissolution

Mikhail Gorbachev

Joined the CPSU in 1952 and, after a relatively rapid career in the bureaucracy, was appointed Communist Party Secretary General on March 11, 1985, following the death of his predecessor, Chernenko. He immediately launched his proposal to restructure and modernize the economy and Soviet society, known as perestroika. This reform process had an immediate consequence: the USSR was to limit its international commitments and increasing military spending, especially high since the Red Army was jammed into the war in Afghanistan. To that end, Gorbachev's doctrine of novomyshlenie or "new thinking" meant ending the long conflict between East and West and pursuing standardization. During a time when international relations were marked by the conflict of "Euromissiles," Gorbachev launched a proposal for disarmament, which contrasted with the Strategic Defense Initiative promoted by Reagan. While the Soviet proposal was received with much caution in the West, Gorbachev immediately relaunched relations with Washington. In his first meeting with Reagan in Geneva, the Soviet leader accepted the principle of dismantling the SS-20 to change the Western Pershing and Cruise missiles. Following another unsuccessful summit in Reykjavik (Iceland) in October 1986, finally, on November 28, 1987, in Washington, Reagan signed the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF Treaty), agreeing to the destruction of all intermediate-range missiles deployed in Europe. Finally, with President George Bush, he signed the START treaty, which involved a reduction of between 25% and 30% of strategic nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev's Global Impact

In the rest of the world, Gorbachev turned his actions to end conflicts arising in the context of the Cold War. First, he reached an agreement on April 14, 1988, for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was implemented as agreed on February 15, 1989. Pressure from Moscow led to the Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia, allowing the normalization of relations with Beijing. In Africa, he dissociated himself from the fate of the Ethiopian dictatorship of Mengistu and accepted the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola in 1988. He failed to persuade Fidel Castro of the virtues of perestroika and started the withdrawal of economic aid and the Soviet military presence on the island. He also helped to end civil wars in Nicaragua, which led to the defeat of the Sandinistas at the polls in 1990, and El Salvador. Finally, in the Middle East, he supported, albeit with hesitation, the Western position after the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait. Jointly with Bush, he convened a peace conference on the Middle East in Madrid. However, the Kremlin's new attitude under Gorbachev was of greater importance in the people's democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. His refusal to intervene to prop up dictatorships was key to the occurrence of the revolutions of 1989, which represented the collapse of communism in the region. Breaking the Brezhnev Doctrine, Gorbachev did nothing to shore up the decomposition of the GDR regime, accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Gorbachev, especially after an interview with Chancellor Helmut Kohl in July 1990, accepted the inescapable nature of the reunification of Germany and the maintenance of the FRG in NATO. The collapse of communist dictatorships led to the dissolution of Comecon in June 1991 and the Warsaw Pact on July 1 of that year. This event had been compensated with the signing on November 19, 1990, in Paris of the Treaty for the Reduction of Conventional Forces in Europe, which established military parity between the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Decline and Resignation

Very popular in the West, Gorbachev was increasingly criticized within the USSR. The failure of economic reform and the impoverishment of the population encouraged a group of Communist supporters to return to the Soviet dictatorship, plotting a coup. This finally occurred in August 1991. Although the coup failed, Gorbachev's position was completely debilitated. The new strongman, the Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, precipitated the resignation of Gorbachev as head of the Soviet state on December 25, 1991. At the same time, there was the dissolution of the state created by Lenin.