Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to question the ideological basis of the Cold War. Even he, however, came only gradually to understand the incompatibility of a presumed international class struggle with a stable peace among nations. During his first years as General-Secretary of the Communist Party he began to develop what came to be known as “new thinking,” which eventually revised many traditional Soviet policies. But he had difficulty tearing himself away from the old ways.

As Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s principal foreign policy adviser, noted in his memoirs, after a year in office Gorbachev’s thinking “was still contaminated by ideological and class mythology …[and] hampered by old commitments to friends and allies as well as the duties of ‘proletarian’ and ‘socialist’ internationalism.” Fortunately, Gorbachev subsequently discarded most of these ideological blinders and, in his speech to the United Nations on December 7, 1988, officially discarded the international class struggle as the basis of Soviet foreign policy. “Freedom of choice” of a country’s political orientation “must not be limited,” he announced.

Developments in 1989 and 1990 proved that he meant what he had said. The iron curtain that had divided Europe since 1946 disappeared even more rapidly than it had been installed. In less than two years every important manifestation of Cold War confrontation had ended.

These are the reasons I would argue that the Cold War began in 1917, took on a more threatening form of direct military and geopolitical competition in 1945 and 1946, and ended in principle in December 1988. Once the ideological basis for the Cold War was removed, the overt manifestations of that competition were rapidly eliminated. From 1989, East-West negotiations no longer seemed a zero-sum game. In fact, by then both sides professed the same goals: a Europe whole and free, and a world where international disputes would be solved through negotiation rather than through attempts by one side or the other to impose its will by force. By the end of 1990, there were no important Cold War issues left.

The Cold War ended on terms the United States and its allies had set, but that does not mean it was a defeat for the Soviet Union. The agreements Gorbachev made were in his country’s interest, as was his eventual rejection of communist ideology. When the Cold War ended, everybody won. Communist ideology and the political system it spawned were the losers, not the country they held in their power for some 70 years.

What happened subsequently to the Soviet Union is another story, but several things should be clear. First, however one defines it, the Cold War ended well before the Soviet Union collapsed. Second, the Soviet Union collapsed despite the end of the Cold War and not as a direct result of it. Ending the Cold War opened the door to efforts to reform the Soviet Union in an attempt to make it competitive in the modern world. These attempts failed because the domestic political process proved incapable of transforming a state so inherently flawed. Third, the Russian Federation, one of the 15 successors of the Soviet Union, was not a party to the Cold War. Finally, it is mistaken to think of today’s Russia as merely a smaller and weaker embodiment of the Soviet Union. It is a fundamentally different state, even if some of its leaders occupied prominent positions in the Soviet Union.

The Cold War as we knew it in the 20th century is over. Though there doubtless will continue to be tensions and conflict between nations, we will not experience a repeat of the Cold War, for that conflict was over an ideology that has already passed into history.