On July 31, 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed in Moscow by U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, committing each superpower to reducing nuclear arms by a third. In a press conference held at the Kremlin, President Bush discusses the economic cooperation implicit in the peace negotiations.

The end of the Cold War was a greater historical transformation than 9/11, but controversy persists about its causes. An article by Steven Erlanger in Monday's New York Times quotes the neo-conservative commentator Robert Kagan as saying that "the standard narrative is Reagan." But the standard narrative is misleading.

When a Soviet army newspaper called Margaret Thatcher the "Iron Lady" in 1976, this was intended as a scornful put-down. Four days earlier, the new Conservative leader had delivered a speech entitled "Britain Awake", stating her resolve to resist the "Communist aggression" that had threatened Europe and the world since 1945. "Red Star" duly retaliated by deriding the empty words of a rusting "Iron Lady". By the end of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, however, the Cold War was over and the world had been remade.

The tension in relations between Russia and the West is at a more dangerous level today than at any time since the first Reagan administration (1980-84). So it is worth recalling a period (largely overlapping with the second Reagan administration) when Russia was becoming a freer country by the month. It was a death in Moscow 30 years ago today - 10 March 1985 - that opened the door to domestic reform and to dramatic change in the political map of Europe.

Wilson Center Digital Archive. This is a collection of primary source documents covering the collapse of the Soviet Union during the late 1980’s. The collection contains documents from archives in most of the former Soviet bloc countries. They discuss the changes occurring in Eastern Europe and the Tiananmen Square events in China. There are also many cables from the Romanian embassies in Beijing, Berlin, Sofia, and Moscow.

In the 1980s, the Cold War was going strong and was made worse by events such as the death of three Soviet leaders in a span of three years, the Soviet shootdown of a Korean airliner, and the USSR's support for Communist governments and movements in Afghanistan and Central America. This collection of declassified documents and other material highlights what the CIA provided President Reagan and other top members of his national security team on key issues affecting US-Soviet relations. The collection--made up of intelligence assessments, National Intelligence Estimates, high-level memos, and DCI talking points--consists of over 200 documents, some 60 of which are either being made available to the public for the first time or are being re-released with new material. To help put this material in perspective, we are also including non-CIA documents from the archives of the Reagan Library to fill out the collection on the policy end.

Previously Secret Documents from Soviet and U.S. Files on the 1989 Meeting, 20 Years Later