1 In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
2 Gorbachev approached the problems of this country by introducing two new policies: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
3 In November 1985, Gorbachev met US president Roland Reagan at Geneva for the first superpower summit since 1979, where a new atmosphere of cooperation between the two countries was emerging.
4 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.
5 In December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF(Intermediate Nuclear Force) Treaty in Washington signifying anew warmth of feeling between the superpowers.
6 In 1988, Soviet troops were removed from Afghanistan after nine years of bitter fighting.
6 By November 1989 the decision to open the border between East and West Germany had been made.
7 On 9 November, people from the two sides helped to destroy the Berlin Wall and the two Germainies reunited.
8 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.