Coming in from the Cold War

The early 1980s brought dramatic changes in East-West relations. The decade began with the death of Yugoslavia's Tito, the birth of Poland's Solidarity trade union, and the U.S. election of Ronald Reagan as president. These key developments, together with the growing financial insolvency of the Soviet bloc and shifts in power in the Kremlin—culminating in the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985—signalled the end of an era. Since t