The Cold war and Beyond.In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.He inherited a vast country comprising 15 republics the economy of which was close to collapse and where corruption flourished. The country badly needed reform, although few could foresee its effects.Gorbachev approached the problems of this country by introducing two new policies: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). His aims were to identify those areas that needed reform and encourage popular debate about how best to deal with them. At first, such policies were welcome, but as the shortcomings of the system were revealed, people soon became discontented: the problem turned out to be so deep-rooted that only radical reforms could solve them.The initial optimism, however, did have an effect on relations between the Soviet Union and the West. As early as November 1985, Gorbachev met US president Roland Reagan at Geneva for the first superpower summit since 1979. The summit showed that a new atmosphere of cooperation between the two countries was emerging. A second summit at Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986, at which Gorbachev offered dramatic cuts to nuclear weapons, was not very successful, although the proposals were not ignored. In December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF(Intermediate Nuclear Force) Treaty in Washington signifying anew warmth of feeling between the superpowers. To many people it meant, that the cold war beginning to come to an end. This was supported by changes in Soviet foreign policy. in 1988, Soviet troops were removed from Afghanistan after nine years of bitter fighting.By the late 1980s the influence of Gorbachev's reforms had begun to be felt in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. These countries got much greater autonomy. The effects were dramatic.Almost immediately, as travel restrictions eased, people tries to leave countries such as East Germany for the West. By November 1989 the decision to open the border between East and West Germany had been made. On 9 November, people from the two sides helped to destroy the berlin Wall, for long a symbol of the divide. Soon after that radical political changes were made in a number of East European countries - Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia. In the new atmosphere of reform the two Germanies reunited. The cold war came to an official end in November 1990, when 34 countries representing the old East West divide signed the Charter of paris for a new Europe.
