ABSTRACT
The Cold War ended definitively in August 1991 with the failure of a coup directed against Mikhail Gorbachev's political and economic reforms engineered by senior members of the Soviet Communist Party. After the attempted coup, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, Russia became a separate country, and the Communist Party was abolished—albeit temporarily—by its recently elected president, Boris Yeltsin. 1 One could say that the Cold War ended earlier. The acquiescence of the Soviet Union in the replacement of the Communist government of Poland with an elected coalition government including anti-Communist Solidarity leaders in 1989, the fall of Communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, the unification of Germany, the return of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and many parts of Eastern Europe, and the holding of competitive elections in Russia might also be cited as key turning points. But the world knew that there would be no more Soviet Union after 1991, and without the Soviet Union there could be no Cold War.
