DO THE END OF COLD WAR IS THE HISTORICAL MOMENT FOR THE "WIND OF CHANGE " SONG OF SCORPIONS

After the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, the USSR and the US saw each other as profound enemies due to their economic and political differences. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing part or all of some and maintaining others as satellite states. The post-war recovery of Western Europe was facilitated by the United States' Marshall Plan, while the Soviet Union, wary of the conditions attached,
declined to participate and prompted its satellite states to do likewise. An alternative, COMECON, was set up by the Soviets instead. The United States forged NATO, a military alliance using containment of communism as a main strategy (Truman Doctrine), in 1949, while the Soviet bloc formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and others chose to stay neutral with the Non-Aligned Movement. Elsewhere, the US and USSR fought proxy wars of various types: in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results.The Cold War featured cycles of relative calm and of high tension. The most tense involved the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would probably guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

  

  THE END OF COLD WAR

 In the 1980s, under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the nation was already suffering economic stagnation. In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have had a significant impact on the world today, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media feature.In the late 1980s, the Cold War came to a dramatic end. The economies of nations behind the Iron Curtain were in trouble. People in East Germany, for instance, could see the prosperity and wealth of their West German neighbors. In Russia, there were long lines of people waiting to buy food. They had to have coupons from the government just to buy socks. Some historians believe that the trillions of dollars that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. spent on nuclear arms and conventional armies had caused the problems in.  Russia. There was also a lot of pent up demand for freedom in the citizens living behind the Iron Curtain