The Resolution of the Cold War Hour 5 Independent Study After events such as the Cuban Missile crisis,

the nations of the world came to a decision that tensions between the East and the West were too high. So, the USSR and the West started a series of tension relaxing processes called dtente. Many of the dtente strategies were nuclear weapons reduction treaties (such as SALT I and SALT II) to make total nuclear war less of an inevitability, but the other method of relaxing tensions was the international relations conferences that happened throughout the world. The most important outcome of these conferences was once again nuclear weapons reductions. The Cold War finally came to an end in December of 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. In the years leading up to its collapse, the Soviet Union had been plagued by a multitude of problems, from political imprisonment to massive famines. Eventually, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, had to start instituting reforms in order to keep the people from revolting. These were called the Glasnost Reforms. By the early nineties, they had just started to work. The Soviet economy was picking up, and the food supply had increased. However, Boris Yeltsin, one of the first democratically elected leaders in Russia (he had been elected President of one of the Soviet Unions constituent republics, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or SFSR) seized power by agitating tensions between liberal Soviets and the nationalist and ethnic factions. This, combined with a military coup detat, forced Gorbachev to resign when Belarus and the Ukraine broke away and became sovereign nations. Yeltsin introduced free market Capitalism to the reunited Russia, and effectively ended Marxism-Leninism as a governing ideology.

The collapse of the Soviet Union shattered it and all of its satellite countries into independent states. The fifteen republics that comprised the Soviet Union proper reunified into the Russian Federation, much the same as they had been during the days of the Russian Empire. The satellite countries all abandoned their Communist ideologies and turned to Capitalism, but without the strong guiding force of the Soviet Union helping them, most of the countries fell prey to corruption and violence, such as Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Georgia. Now, there are only a few countries that actually claim to rule with a Marxist-Leninist ideology: Cuba, China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam. Out of these five countries, none actually have the classless society that their ideology demands.