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The End of the Cold War and the Dissolution of the USSR

What was the connection between the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Was there a causal link between them? If so, what was the cause and what was the consequence? Or was it a mere coincidence of two historic events that developed each according to its own logic, more or less unrelated to the other? Unfortunately, Jörg Baberowski’s very interesting study of the crisis in Soviet society during the period of perestroika does not pose these questions. To some extent this omission can be attributed to an understandable rejection of the hackneyed myth that the Soviet Union could not withstand the pressures of the Cold War and so threw in the towel – an acknowledgement of defeat that undermined its authority and legitimacy and became the chief cause of its collapse. There is another, even cruder version of this myth, according to which the Cold War ended with the disappearance of the USSR from the political map and its consequences. This version blatantly contradicts the actual sequence of events: neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor the reunification of Germany, nor the «velvet revolution» could have happened while the Cold War was still in progress. It is to Baberowski’s credit that he so clearly refuses to subscribe to such myths. But it is equally obvious that his near-exclusive concentration on the internal problems of Soviet society, and consequent neglect of the international context, leaves a gap in his analysis. This paper is an attempt to fill the gap.