End of the Cold War

  • 1st McDonalds opens in Moscow

    Kroc's first McDonald's restaurant opened on April 15, 1955, at 400 North Lee ... for new ways to perfect the McDonald's system, experimenting, for example, ..... will overshadow the current largest McDonald's in the world in Moscow, Russia.
  • U.S. boycott of 1980 Summer Olympics

    The 1980 Summer Olympics boycott of the Moscow Olympics was a part of a package of actions initiated by the United States to protest against the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. It preceded the 1984 Summer Olympics boycott carried out by the Soviet Union and other Communist-friendly countries.
  • Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

    The INF Treaty is the first nuclear arms control agreement to actually reduce nuclear arms, rather than establish ceilings that could not be exceeded.
  • Strategic Defense Initiative

    Strategic Defense Initiative
    The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983, to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles.
  • Caribbean Basin Initiative

    Caribbean Basin Initiative
    The Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) was a unilateral and temporary United States program initiated by the 1983 "Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act" (CBERA). The CBI came into effect on January 1, 1984 and aimed to provide several tariff and trade benefits to many Central American and Caribbean countries.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

    Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
    Soon after, the CPSU, which had already lost much of its ... At the 28th CPSU Congress in July, Gorbachev was re-elected General Secretary but this ... The 'war of laws' had become an open battle, with the Supreme Soviet ... would try all political means to preserve the Union.
  • Iran-Contra Affair

    Iran-Contra Affair
    During the Reagan administration, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo. Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of several hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
  • Berlin Wall Collapes

    A wall that separated West Berlin, Germany, from East Germany, which surrounded it until 1989. At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Berlin, the German capital, into four sectors. The eastern, or Russian, sector became the capital of communist East Germany. The French, British, and American sectors continued as a prosperous Western “island” city surrounded by East Germany. From then until 1961, many East Germans, sometimes two thousand a day, fled to West Berlin.
  • Boris Yelstin elected President of Russia

    President of the Russian republic who criticized the slow pace of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. In 1991, he successfully led the opposition to an attempted coup by communist hard-liners and became the most powerful person in the former Soviet Union. As president, Yeltsin led the Russian republic in its difficult and often chaotic struggle to move away from centralized economic planning, but he was plagued by poor health, conservative opposition, and a lagging economy.
  • Germany is reunified

    Accordingly, on Unification Day, 3 October 1990, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and its territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany as five new Federal States. East and West Berlin were reunited, and joined the Federal Republic as a full-fledged Federal City-State.
  • Warsaw Pact is dissolved

    Warsaw Pact is dissolved
    an organization formed in Warsaw, Poland (1955), comprising Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the U.S.S.R., for collective defense under a joint military command.
  • end of the Soviet Union

    end of the Soviet Union
    The Belavezha Accords is the agreement that declared the Soviet Union effectively dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place.