Why did the Cold War come to an end? Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?

Why did the Cold War come to an end? Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?

Yeltsin. He outlawed the Communist party or something along that line.

The RCP is still legal and active, and until recently still continued to do well in elections. I think they lost bad in the last one.

Yeltsin. He outlawed the Communist party or something along that line.
I've heard from many Americans who think Reagan did it singlehandedly, but I've never heard this one before. If I am correct, it was Gorbachev and his 'glastnost', 'perestroika' and 'democratization' programs.

I lost my post on West Germany's Ostpolitik foreign policy. :(

Why did the Cold War come to an end? Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?

Several reasons really. Reagan for one had little to do with its end.

John Lukacs explains this well in his End of the 20th Century and the End of the Modern Era. When I have time(yes I've been short of time lately) I can post excerpts.

The Russian system was falling apart. Reagan was lucky enough to be president at the same time as Gorbachev was trying to reform Russia.

The only thing that Reagan really did was spend huge amounts of US money on worthless missile defence systems and the like, forcing the USSR to spend money too.

Why did the Cold War come to an end? Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?

The USSR met the fate of all socialist economies: consumption of its productive capital and misallocation of resources. Then, once the Ukranians, Georgians, Uzbekistanians, etc., realized that the empire lacked the means to enforce the Union, they promptly seceded.

I agree with SST that the economy of the Soviet Union did ultimately stew in its own juices, but I'd also give a nod to the policy of Containment. I'd say it did work, after a fashion. The old Mutually Assured Destruction (wonderful acronym: 'MAD' :p ) meant that neither side dared so much as set a big toe into the other's sphere of influence, although I'm not sure what would have happened had "Eurocommunism" ever come to power in France, and particularly, Italy. This was a movement to win power via the ballot. It had a huge following in the late 70s and early 80s. I also think that everybody in the West was caught flat-footed over Solidarity, and that

The Soviet Union was a polyglot state that could only be maintained at bayonet point. Perhaps Russians and Ukranians could find common ground to form a nation or at least some sort of confederation, but I doubt the Baltic states, Uzbeks, and whatever those other nations of today that look like a random collection of Scrabble tiles are called have any interest in voluntarily doing any such thing.

As an aside, I agree that it is over, but I'm afraid there's also a part of me that believes that neither side truly won. Simply because one fighter manages to finally put the other on the canvas (after 45 years!) it doesn't mean that the "victor" is also not in a world of hurt. Thus during the post-war period the Japanese and to a lesser extent the West Germans were able to ship goods around the world under the protection of the US Navy, focus their economies towards export goods rather than military ones...nothing wrong with that, as it is exactly what the US did for most of the 19th century during Pax Brittanica, but that's getting a bit off topic. As another example, the "opportunity cost" to the USA of having huge numbers of at least one generation of engineers in the defense industry must also be high.

SST is right , a country badly run for years slowly falling apart .
The failures and wastes ignored and covered up , they simply went broke.
The classic Russian car says it all " Lada".
The string of Lada car jokes speaks for itself.

I did some reading and it seems that the final straw was that there was a coup, Gorbo was placed under house arrest, Yeltsin went onto the side of Gorbo and ended the coup and was a big hero. Blah blah blah. Then he outlaws the communist party from running the USSR and renames it the CIS. Gorbo was the president of a nation that no longer existed.

Gorbo's aim though I think was the make the USSR more accountable to its citizens and the world. Basically, bringing in more democracy which the communist party had always stated were its aims.

Why did the Cold War come to an end? Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?
I think the main reason is not giving more economic freedoms soon enough, before the system went totally corrupt and crumbled, without anything to fall back on.

The communism as a viable ideology died long before the ultimate fall of the system.

Reagan is a joke. Only fools believe that the commies were scared into disbanding their system by that actor.

Reagan is a joke. Only fools believe that the commies were scared into disbanding their system by that actor.

Not true. He called them the "Evil Empire" and they panicked. :D

And to think, had Reagan got that role in Star Wars, the Soviet Union would still be around today...