ABSTRACT
The Cold War, the great superpower stand-off between the USA and the Soviet Union, the confrontation between Communism and Western values, was not a formal or frontal conflict between the superpowers, but a period of sustained hostility involving a protracted arms race, as well as numerous proxy conflicts in which the major powers intervened in other struggles. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the Cold War marked the apparent culmination of military history, being the latest as well as then current stage both of total war and of an approach to confrontation and conflict in terms of symmetrical warfare. Instead of such a conflict, nationalism in the republics, in December 1991, led to their peaceful independence, and thus to the collapse of the Soviet Union, while Gorbachev resigned, to be replaced by Boris Yeltsin. With Soviet Communism in ruins and Chinese Communism increasingly market-orientated and looking in particular to the American market, the Cold War was over.
