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The Swahili have a proverb: When the elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled. For more than 45 years, the elephantine superpowers of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States fought the Cold War -- and some might argue the grass was, in this case, the rest of the world.

While the Cold War was largely a war of threats, there was plenty of real violence, too. The aggression between the U.S. and USSR spilled over into places like Angola and Nicaragua, and the two nations fought proxy wars -- conflicts between warring parties of a third nation, but supported by the U.S. and USSR. The soil of European nations served as nuclear missile sites for both sides. In Soviet satellite states, populations were repressed and subjugated by communist rule. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet condoned kidnapping and murder of the leftist population under an American-backed regime. And the global psyche was plagued by anxiety over possible nuclear war.

The tense standoff that characterized the Cold War ended when the USSR collapsed in 1991, becoming the Russian Federation. This collapse was preceded by revolutions in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the USSR fell, the Soviet states dissolved. The end of the Cold War came so abruptly (and with such finality) that even years later, disbelief gripped the West. A 1998 episode of the American TV show " The Simpsons" depicts a Russian delegate at the United Nations referring to his country as the Soviet Union. "Soviet Union?" asks the American delegate. "I thought you guys broke up." "Nyet! That's what we wanted you to think!" the Soviet delegate replies and laughs ominously [source: IMDB].

This scene underscores a hallmark of the Cold War's conclusion: uncertainty. What exactly led to the downfall of the Soviet Union? Was the collapse of the USSR inevitable, or did America hasten its disintegration? Or, as former CIA director and Soviet expert Robert Gates puts it, "Did we win or did the Soviets just lose?" [source: Powers].

On the next page, we'll examine the theory that the United States brought down the USSR.

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The Swahili have a proverb: When the elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled. For more than 45 years, the elephantine superpowers of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States fought the Cold War -- and some might argue the grass was, in this case, the rest of the world.

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Cold War #4: Problems Continue - Lessons - Tes Teach

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1. Take notes on the video lecture(s) "Cold War #4: Problems Continue." 2. Review the diagram in tile 2 and watch the short video in Tile 2 about the Berlin Wall. A. Why do you think people were so determined to escape to West Berlin? B.

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1 who won the cold war
2 who won the space race
3 who took down the Berlin wall

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The Cold War was the time period from the end of WWII in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You can see on this Cold War Map of the world that the struggle involved nearly every country on earth.

Some Cold War Background

The Cold War was a struggle between the communist east and the republican west. It is called "cold" because though there were wars with armies and bullets and tanks and planes, the two big powers, the US and the USSR, never fought an all out head to head war during these decades. Instead they fought by supplying money and equipment to their allies and pawns, through intelligence and covert operations, and through public opinion.

They never fought each other directly because both countries had many, many nuclear weapons and they were both afraid of the results of unleashing these most terrible of bombs on the earth.

Cold War Map to Color

Print the The Cold War Map of the World by clicking on the map or the link.

Some things to learn about as you color this map:

What is NATO? Which countries were involved in NATO? Does it still exist?

What is the Warsaw Compact? Which countries signed the compact? Does it still exist?

Look up one or two of the counties where Communist or anti-communist guerrillas were operating. What happened there?

The "Cold War Hot Spots" are places where actual armed conflicts broke out. Learn about one or two of these hot wars during these time periods by looking up the history of the country. Most people have at least heard of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but did you know there was a war in Angola as well?

Why did so many countries get involved in a conflict that we essentially between the United States and the Soviet Union? What was it all about?

The US and USSR were allies during WWII, so why did they end up enemies so quickly afterward?

More From Layers of Learning

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Cold War Map of the World - Layers of Learning

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The Cold War was the time period from the end of WWII in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You can see on this Cold War Map of the world that the struggle involved nearly every country on earth. The Cold War was a struggle between the communist east and the republican west.

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Throughout the 40 years of the Cold War, popular uprisings against governments established by the Soviet Union in east-central Europe took place over and over again - in East Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland almost too many times to count - but repeatedly failed.

In the fall of 1989, they succeeded. No one saw revolution on the way, and certainly no one could have predicted that it would take place as peacefully as it did. (The exception, of course, was the violent revolution in Romania, but even there the casualty figures were not large.) These were complex events, and the details differed substantially from country to country. Most historians would probably agree that the outcome was the result of a mix of factors. Yet simplified views still abound - and the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall will offer plenty of opportunity to rehearse some of them yet again. Here's a reality check on the most persistent myths:

No. 1: It was Ronald Reagan.

In this version of history, U.S. President Ronald Reagan's resolute hawkishness and emancipatory eloquence saved the day for the free world.

On June 12, 1987, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Reagan issued a challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to make good on his promises of liberalization. "Come here, to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan's supporters claim that this speech played a key role in sparking the events of 1989, but there's little evidence to back this up.

In fact, Reagan's words left little obvious imprint on the thinking of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. The opposition movements in East Germany and Czechoslovakia were more peacenik than Grand Old Party; in Poland, Solidarity activists already had their own pope as a moral beacon. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times even ran Reagan's speech on the front page. Some Reaganites tended to regard the speech as a grand bit of political theater, intended mainly for consumption back home, with limited real-world repercussions. Reagan's own national security advisor, Frank Carlucci, later recalled thinking, "It's a great speech line. But it will never happen."

And in West Berlin itself - where the late-1980s population included a disproportionate number of Greens and counterculture refugees from West Germany's draft - the applauders were outnumbered by the rioters, who chose to protest against Reagan's conservative policies rather than applaud his chutzpah. If anything, it was Reagan's willingness, throughout most of his second term, to meet Gorbachev halfway that helped the Soviet leader back away from the use of force - an achievement that led British journalist Victor Sebestyen to dub Reagan "America's Leading Dove."

No. 2: It was inevitable.

Those who hold this view usually argue that history was on the side of the protesters because Communist Party leaders wouldn't have dared to use force.

It certainly didn't look that way at the time. The June 4 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square - and to some extent the violence used by pro-regime forces in Romania - vividly demonstrate that resorting to firepower remained an option. In China the use of force proved successful in defending the regime's claim to power; in Romania it didn't. But that failure might have been precisely because Romania's uprising had already been preceded by peaceful revolts elsewhere in Central Europe, thereby fatally undermining the system's defenders.

Had East Germany's much more efficient communist leadership resorted to force to put down anti-government protests, the chilling effect could have swept across the entire region. It was an option that Erich Honecker and his cronies in the East German Politburo considered very seriously indeed. In September 1989, East German TV aired frequent paeans to the "resolute" approach of their Beijing comrades. One broadcast featured a member of the party's paramilitary force vowing to "defend socialism with a gun in the hand."

On Oct. 9, 1989, the authorities handed live ammunition to security forces ahead of the scheduled " Monday Demonstration" in Leipzig and mobilized hospitals to prepare for the large numbers of casualties that would have resulted. (As it happened, some 50,000 people took to the streets that evening.) But a last-minute effort by local notables and party leaders to avert violence saved the day from bloodshed. The history of Europe would have looked far different if they hadn't.

No. 3: It was the CIA.

According to this theory, U.S. spies, by aiding the enemies of their enemy, fatally weakened and ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.

It's true that the U.S. spooks in Langley helped the Afghan mujahideen, who played a critical role in weakening Soviet power during the 1980s. They also made sure that funds and equipment flowed to Solidarity in Poland with the help of John Paul II's Vatican.

But in most pivotal events of 1989, the CIA was decidedly behind the curve. In the second half of the 1980s it consistently failed to deduce Gorbachev's true intentions. As late as September 1988 the CIA was still issuing memoranda that predicted the continued survival of the Eastern European regimes. When the Berlin Wall came down and the White House demanded information, the embarrassed U.S. spies had to admit that they had no agents in place in East Berlin or the Kremlin.

Milton Bearden, who was then in charge of CIA operations against the Soviet bloc, had spent that historic night watching CNN. "It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn - they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the CIA knew why," wrote New York Times' Tim Weiner in his history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. (The reason was the mole within the CIA, Aldrich Ames, who had already betrayed every U.S. asset in the Soviet Union he had identified.)

No. 4: It was the KGB.

Communism lost out in 1989, but many individual communists (and reborn communist parties) ended up doing quite well, giving rise to persistent KGB conspiracy theories.

As British journalist Edward Lucas recently wrote, "The dissidents, for the most part, proved hopeless politicians and while most Eastern European countries are now in the European Union and NATO, they are largely run by former members of the Communist Party." But that observation is not the same as alleging, as some conspiracy theorists do, that the events of 1989 were engineered by the KGB to allow certain Bolsheviks to continue enjoying the perks of power.

The theory is easily discounted in East Germany, where members of the secret police, the hated Stasi, were subject to harsh scrutiny and, in some cases, arrest.

As for the KGB itself, recently released archival documents reveal that the Soviet spooks were just as out of the loop as the U.S. spies. When the East German communist leadership decided to liberalize travel regulations, inadvertently inspiring its citizens to trek to the wall and demand passage through, the government neglected to inform the Soviets.

Perhaps most incredibly, aides to Gorbachev didn't even bother to wake him up during the night that the wall was falling apart. The man who would later get the credit for freeing Eastern Europe actually slept through the main event.

No. 5: It was all about economics.

By this interpretation, those big public demonstrations in east-central Europe may have looked impressive, but what really drove change in 1989 was the economy.

This view is a vast oversimplification. Yes, the economic weakness of the Soviet system was already clear for the world to see. And yes, the governments in East Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest, and elsewhere in the Warsaw Pact countries were staggering under huge loads of foreign debt that greatly constrained their ability to react to turmoil at home. (East Germany's foreign debt, for example, reached $26.5 billion by 1989. Merelyservicing that obligation cost $4.5 billion annually, nearly 60 percent of export earnings.)

Yet the experience of Cuba and North Korea - which were essentially bankrupt by 1989 as well, and which nearly collapsed when the ex-Soviet Union withdrew most of its support for them - have shown that communist regimes are perfectly capable of surviving beyond their economic due dates through sheer determination to keep the lid on.

Neither did the fact that Eastern European communists owed all their debt to Western bankers prove a great liability, as some have alleged. That might have been the case if the United States and its allies had been willing to exert financial leverage to specific policy ends. In fact, the story of 1989 is very much one of Western political caution. From Helmut Kohl to Margaret Thatcher to George H.W. Bush, Western leaders were reluctant to do anything that could be interpreted as "destabilizing" the region.

In reality it was the crowds on the streets in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest that fused inchoate anger at the regimes into an immediate and urgent challenge to the apparatchiks' power and legitimacy.

The sudden surge in popular discontent, coupled with such other factors as the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his refusal to use Soviet troops to suppress protests; the moribund economies of the Warsaw Pact states; the gradual loss of belief in Marxist ideology among populations and functionaries alike; and a much greater flow of information about the West to the countries of the East all contributed to the events of 1989. Yet in their quest for a simple explanation, historians continue to look for The One.

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Throughout the 40 years of the Cold War, popular uprisings against governments established by the Soviet Union in east-central Europe took place over and over again - in East Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland almost too many times to count - but repeatedly failed.

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Most people agree that the space race ended on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon for the first time [source: National Air and Space Museum]. As the climax of space history so far, the lunar landing essentially squelched the heated competition between the United States and the USSR.

But the story isn't opened and closed so quickly. Although the Americans put a man on the moon first, that triumph was fueled by a series of back-to-back accomplishments by the Soviets. All in all, the space race played out as a dramatic comeback for the United States starting in 1968, rather than a decisive victory.

For example, between 1957 and 1965, the USSR put up the first:

Intercontinental ballistic missile (August 1957)

Artificial satellite (October 1957)

Dog in space (November 1957)

Satellite to orbit the moon (1959)

Man into space (April 1961)

Man to spend a day in orbit (August 1961)

Long-duration flight for five days (June 1963)

Woman in space (June 1963)

Man to perform a spacewalk (March 1965)

This space race also took place in the context of dramatically different resources. While the United States spent $25 billion on the Apollo program to the moon, the USSR spent half that at most [source: Keller]. In fact, the Soviet Union publicly denied its engagement in a lunar program, although declassified documents have shown otherwise.

The key difference in the country's lunar developments boiled down to creating a rocket capable of reaching the moon with a crew and equipment. For the United States, the Saturn V rocket developed by November 1967 hit that sweet spot. The USSR's moon rocket N-1 repeatedly failed testing.

Instead, the Soviets sent up Luna 3, a satellite with a robotic arm meant to bring back moon samples. Although it reached the moon successfully in 1969, it got stuck in orbit and was circling the moon as Neil Armstrong touched down. After a series of additional attempts at perfecting the moon rocket for a manned flight, Soviets pulled the plug on the program in 1974 [source: Keller]. The USSR would launch the first space station Salyut 1 in 1971, but the space race fervor had subsided by then.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union and its transformation into Russia brought it and the U.S. together for collaboration. Both countries led the world in space technology, and they signed an agreement in 1993 to develop a joint space station. While funding shortages on the Russian side and technical problems for the United States have caused friction, the two continue to work with 13 other nations toward the completion of the International Space Station.

With China's emerging dominance in the world, we could see another space race to the moon in the coming decades. President Bush announced in 2004 that the United States would return to the moon by 2020. China's space exploration Project 921 involves the same lunar goal on a similar timetable [source: Ritter], which begs the question: Will the U.S. come in first again?

To learn more about outer space, head to the links on the next page.

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Most people agree that the space race ended on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon for the first time [source: National Air and Space Museum]. As the climax of space history so far, the lunar landing essentially squelched the heated competition between the United States and the USSR.

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The Reagan Legacy: The End of the Cold War