The USSR had more satellite states that it needed to spend more to prop up than the U.S. had to invest in its Allies. And the Soviet system could never keep up with economic growth in the West. But , probably the individual most responsible for the end of the Cold War was Mikhail Baryshnikov. No? Mikhail Gorbachev? Well, that’s boring. I always thought the Soviets danced their way to freedom. No? It was Glasnost and Perestroika? Alright. But Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glosnost opened up the Soviet political and economic systems with contested local eletions, less restricted civil society groups, less censorship, more autonomy for the Soviet Republics, more non-state-run businesses and more autonomy for state-run farms. Glasnost or “openness” led to more information from the west and less censorship led to a flood of criticism as people realized how much poorer the second world was than the first. And one by one, often quite suddenly, former communist states collapsed. In Germany, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. In Poland, the Gdansk dockworker’s union Solidarity turned into a mass political movement and won 99 of the 100 seats it was allowed to contest in the 1989 election. Hungary held multiparty elections in 1990. The same year, mass demonstrations led to elections in Czechoslovakia. In 1993, that country split up into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the happiest and most mutually beneficial divorce since Cher left Sonny.