Mikhail S. Gorbachev entered office in March 1985 determined to scrap old assumptions about Soviet foreign policy. He had drawn lessons from the return of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s -- and they scared him. The "old thinking" believed that the USSR would emerge victorious in the Cold War if it continued building up its arsenal and fostering "progressive" regimes in the Third World in places like Angola, Ethiopia, and especially Afghanistan. Gorbachev's "new thinking" sought to reorganize and revitalize the Soviet system; but to do so required a favorable international situation to relieve the material burden of arms competition with the West.
The first step in the end of the Cold War came when Mikhail S. Gorbachev implicitly abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine. On 14 April 1988, the Governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the United States and Soviet Union serving as guarantors, signed an agreement known as the Geneva accords. This included five major documents, which, among other things, establishe a timetable that ensured full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by 15 February 1989. Gorbachev demanded that the retreat be orderly and dignified -- he didn't want television images reminiscent of the chaotic 1975 US pullout from Vietnam. "We must not appear before the world in our underwear or even without any," he told the Politburo inner circle. "A defeatist position is not possible." The withdrawal was intended as a sign of conciliation toward the West and reassurance to the East Europeans, but it encouraged others to challenge Soviet power.
The second act of the drama began in the fall of 1989 with peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe (except Romania) and the fall of the Soviet "outer empire." Shortly after Poland's electorate voted the Communists out of government in June 1989, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would not interfere with the internal affairs of the Eastern European countries. By October, Hungary and Czechoslovakia followed Poland's example.
On 09 November 1989, the East German Government opened the Berlin Wall. East Germany, the center of contention throughout the Cold War, was united with West Germany and integrated into NATO. As one historian noted, in Poland communism took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia ten days to disappear. In Romania -- the bloody exception to the rule of peaceful transition -- the end came with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact a year later plus the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe [that substantially reduced Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe] resulted in a stronger Western alliance -- so strong that the US could redeploy forces from Europe to the Persian Gulf for use against Iraq.
The third and final act closed with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. By 1989 Gorbachev's domestic reforms had run into serious trouble, and the economy went into a tailspin. The centrifugal forces in the "outer empire" stimulated and accelerated those in the "inner empire", as the Soviet republics sought sovereignty and then independence. As the center disintegrated and Gorbachev opened up the political process with glasnost (openness), the old communist "barons" in the republics saw the handwriting on the wall and became nationalists; they "first of all attacked the USSR government . . . and subsequently destroyed the USSR." Asked when he decided to secede from the USSR, Ukrainian party boss Leonid Kravchuk replied: "1989" [he did so in mid-1990]. Each of the USSR's republics, as they declared independence or sovereignty, also adopted statements by the republic leaderships on service in the armed forces, including the creation of their own military forces.
Collapse of the Soviet Union - 1989-1991