The end of the Cold War, including Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, the New Thinking in foreign policy, the INF Treaty (December 1987), and the changing superpower relationship

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain how Gorbachev's accession in 1985 and his policies of perestroika, glasnost, and New Thinking ended the Cold War's confrontational dynamic by 1989, through arms control, withdrawal from Afghanistan, the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the bilateral relationship with Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The answer

The Soviet inheritance

By the early 1980s the Soviet system was in deep stagnation (zastoi). Annual growth had fallen from 5 per cent in the 1960s to about 2 per cent in the 1970s and below 2 per cent in the early 1980s. Oil and gas (now generating 60 per cent of export earnings) made the economy hostage to commodity prices; the 1986 collapse of oil to about $10 per barrel removed the rentier cushion. Military spending consumed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of GDP. The Afghan war (since December 1979) cost about 15,000 Soviet lives and approximately$50 billion. The CPSU leadership had aged: Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982, Andropov on 9 February 1984, Chernenko on 10 March 1985.

Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary on 11 March 1985, aged 54, the first Soviet leader born after the revolution. His mentor was Yuri Andropov.

Perestroika and uskorenie

The April 1985 Plenum launched uskorenie (acceleration), an attempt to revive growth through investment in machine-building. The 27th Party Congress (25 February to 6 March 1986) introduced perestroika (restructuring) as a broader programme.

Key measures: the Law on State Enterprises (June 1987) gave enterprises autonomy and the right to retain profits (and the obligation to bear losses, in principle). The Law on Cooperatives (May 1988) legalised private and cooperative enterprise in trade, services, and small manufacturing. The Law on Joint Ventures (January 1987) permitted foreign investment.

The measures failed in practice. Half-marketisation produced inflation, shortages, and queues. State enterprise managers had autonomy without market discipline. The fiscal balance collapsed; the budget deficit reached 11 per cent of GDP by 1991.

Anti-alcohol campaign (May 1985): cut consumption (and tax revenue) without ending the underlying social problem. Estimated revenue loss 1985 to 1987 was about 67 billion roubles.

Glasnost

Glasnost (openness) was less a policy than a permission. Pravda and Ogonyok published criticism of past leaders; Doctor Zhivago (1988), The Children of the Arbat (1987), and Gulag Archipelago (1989) were finally published. The Chernobyl disaster (26 April 1986) tested and broke the culture of secrecy when initial denials gave way under foreign and domestic pressure to disclosure.

Andrei Sakharov was recalled from internal exile in Gorky in December 1986. The Memorial society (1987 to 1988) began documenting Stalinist victims. The 1988 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the 1989 Tbilisi massacre (9 April) revealed nationalist mobilisation glasnost had unleashed.

New Thinking

New Thinking (novoye myshlenie) was articulated by Gorbachev's 1987 book Perestroika and operationalised by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (replaced Andrei Gromyko, July 1985) and Politburo adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev. Core ideas: nuclear weapons made class war between systems impossible; security must be mutual; Europe was "our common European home" (Strasbourg, 6 July 1989); intervention in other socialist countries was no longer legitimate.

The 28th Party Congress (1990) and Gorbachev's 7 December 1988 UN speech announced unilateral conventional cuts of 500,000 personnel and 10,000 tanks and the renunciation of force in international relations.

Afghan withdrawal: agreed at Geneva on 14 April 1988, completed on 15 February 1989. Total Soviet casualties were about 15,000 dead and 35,000 wounded.

The summits and arms control

Reagan and Gorbachev met four times.

Geneva, 19 to 21 November 1985: no agreement but personal rapport; joint statement that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

Reykjavik, 11 to 12 October 1986: Reagan and Gorbachev came within reach of eliminating all ballistic missiles by 1996. The deal collapsed over Reagan's refusal to confine the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, "Star Wars") to the laboratory.

Washington, 8 to 10 December 1987: the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev on 8 December 1987. The treaty eliminated all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres. By the May 1991 deadline, the United States eliminated 846 missiles (Pershing II, ground-launched cruise) and the USSR 1,846 (SS-20, SS-4, SS-5, SS-12, SS-23). On-site verification was unprecedented. The first nuclear arms reduction treaty.

Moscow, 29 May to 3 June 1988: ratification exchange, Reagan's Spaso House speech rejecting the "evil empire" label; "that was another time, another era."

The Sinatra Doctrine

The Brezhnev Doctrine (Pravda, 26 September 1968) had asserted Soviet right to intervene in any socialist country threatening "the foundations of socialism." Gorbachev replaced it with what Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov dubbed (October 1989) the "Sinatra Doctrine": Eastern European states could do it "my way."

The doctrine was tested and confirmed by the Hungarian opening of the Austrian border (10 September 1989), the Polish round-table elections (June 1989), and the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989). Soviet troops did not move.

Bush and the soft handover

George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan on 20 January 1989. After a strategic pause and review, Bush met Gorbachev at Malta (2 to 3 December 1989), days after the Wall fell, and announced (in Gorbachev's words) that the Cold War was over. The strategic relationship moved on to German unification (Two Plus Four Treaty, 12 September 1990), the START I Treaty (31 July 1991), and the Soviet acceptance of Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991).

Timeline

Historiography

Robert Service's biography Gorbachev (2009) and Archie Brown's The Gorbachev Factor (1996) are standard. Vladislav Zubok's A Failed Empire (2007) and Collapse (2021) cover Soviet decline. John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War (2005) treats Gorbachev as decisive but constrained. Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted (2001) argues the Soviet collapse was uncoerced and that Reagan was peripheral.

Common exam traps

Treating Reagan's military build-up as decisive. The build-up added pressure but did not bankrupt the USSR; oil collapse and internal stagnation did.

Conflating glasnost and perestroika. Glasnost was cultural and political openness; perestroika was economic restructuring. Glasnost succeeded politically and destroyed the regime's legitimacy; perestroika failed economically.

Misdating the INF Treaty. 8 December 1987 (signed Washington), ratified May 1988, entered force 1 June 1988.

In one sentence

Gorbachev's reforms (perestroika and glasnost, from April 1985), his New Thinking foreign policy, the Reykjavik (October 1986) and Washington (December 1987) summits producing the INF Treaty, the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine (Sinatra Doctrine, October 1989), and the Afghan withdrawal (February 1989) ended the Cold War's confrontational logic by 1989 by replacing class struggle with common security, even though Gorbachev intended to reform the Soviet system, not to dissolve it.