Actually the Russian occupation did not end until August 1994 in Eastern Europe. But yes by 1990 tensions were in considerable decline of course.
I would actually argue the Cold War never truly ended. In the sense of not only the US vs Russia but actually the debate between capitalism vs socialism as well. The heavily planned variety of socialism took a big blow but Keynesian socialism (I think it is socialist and capitalist at the same time but that’s another topic!) as well as libertarian Mondragon-type socialism are still very much legitimate alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. I think the “Berlin Wall” narrative is something the neoliberal right pushes as a propaganda against socialists. The truth is the Democratic and Republican Party are still fighting the Cold War today.
The events in Ukraine also show that the Kremlin hasn’t given up on its power so Russia is still definitely a world power.
The Cold War in general is a vague thing since it wasn’t an actual war. And I’m not arguing semantics but rather facts:
Although November 9th 1989 is recognised as the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall, official demolition of it didn’t start until June 13th 1990. Between November 9th and June 13th, border controls still existed, although were less strict that previously. Parts of the wall was chipped away by Germans to keep as souvenirs/sell on eBay. People who did this were known as “wall woodpeckers” (Mauerspechte) Some parts of the wall had been taken down but only to make way for more crossing points. All border controls ended on July 1st 1990 and Germany was recognised as one country again from October 3rd 1990.
You still don’t get the impact of what happened that night? What else should they call it? “The Anniversary of the Night People Started To Chip Away At the Wall and Knew It Was Going to be Demolished Soon?” :dubious:
A wall, built for the sole purpose of stopping people from moving across the border but that now fails to stop people from traveling across the border, is no longer a Wall.
1989 makes a better narrative than 1991 because the meaning of 1989 to the entire world was a truly astounding thing, and clear as daylight. The meaning of 1991 may have been clear if you were in Ukraine or Belarus or one of the Baltic states, but to the world at large, both less clear and less important.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent events that fall - as the metaphorical walls fell not only in East Germany where the literal wall fell, but also in Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and finally Romania, all in extremely short order.
Unlike with Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, this time the USSR let all the other Warsaw Pact nations leave without a fight.
Regardless of how you want to spin it, it meant that the Cold War was over. If the USSR was letting Eastern Europe go, it had gotten out of the world domination game, and then some. We would never have to support another Diem or Thieu or Pinochet or D’Aubisson or Somoza or Savimbi in the name of “anti-communism.” (Not that I think that was the right way to be anti-communist, but that’s how the USA played it back then. Let’s not unduly complicate this thread by getting into whether it made sense.) And without that geopolitical game of chess with guns, there would be no reason, no spark, to set off a nuclear war.
The Cold War was over. Really over. Pretty much anyone who was an adult in 1989 knew that. And those of us who had grown up with air raid drills where we uselessly ducked under our desks at school, or against the walls in the halls, we were finally free of wondering whether it would be preferable to survive a nuclear war, or be vaporized by the first bomb.
1989 was fucking amazing. I was 35, and had always figured that if the Cold War ever would end, it was still a long way off. So I was joyous, relieved, and above all, just plain astounded. And felt lucky that I had lived to see the day, honored to have lived through that piece of history.
Now, on to 1991.
With the limited exception of the three Baltic republics (whose pre-Soviet governments we still continued to recognize after all these decades), there was very limited awareness among Americans of the USSR as a union of separate entities. We saw the Warsaw Pact signatories that gained their independence in the fall of 1989 as real and distinct countries. Not so much with Ukraine and Belarus and Georgia and Moldova and Kazakhstan and so forth.
Most Americans probably drew little distinction between Russia and the USSR.
So the breakup of Russia in 1991 (a) didn’t end the Cold War, because it was already over, (b) didn’t change the nuclear situation, since Russia would end up with the nukes of the old USSR, and (c) other than the Baltics, it didn’t mean independence for entities that most of us had ever thought of as countries.
While it clearly wasn’t trivial, and it was clearly a good thing overall, what it did mean really wasn’t clear. And it wasn’t at all clear at the time that it meant the breakup of a world power: Russia at the end of 1991 didn’t yet look that much less powerful than the USSR had at the beginning of the year.
But again, the Cold War had been over for two years already, as far as everyone here was concerned. (Hell, we even had the USSR’s cooperation in Gulf War I. Try doing that back in 1983.) Whatever happened to Russia/USSR after that was distinctly secondary, from a Western standpoint.
June 21, 1788 is when the Constitution was ratified, but that only gets you the basic text; the Bill of Rights, now seen as an inseparable part of the Constitution proper, wasn’t ratified until December 15, 1791.
But even the Constitution plus the first ten amendments isn’t even close to how the country is run now. Under just that, the President is still being sworn in in March, there is no direct election of Senators, only men twenty-one years and older can vote (and then often only white men), and states still don’t have to recognize the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868. That was part of a group of amendments meant to reform the country subsequent to the Civil War, and it at least has the potential to force states to recognize that the basic civil rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are binding upon them. However, that requires something called “incorporation” (because that word is by no means overloaded enough already) and incorporation happened over a very long span of decades, stretching well into the Twentieth Century, particularly for the First Amendment, which was a much weaker document in practice as recently as the 1960s.
I’m not done yet.
Throughout much of the 1930s, FDR was wheeling and dealing for the New Deal, which greatly modified how little issues such as state sovereignty and the regulation of businesses and labor worked. This included concepts such as court packing, which didn’t work, and the landmark decisions National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, which did, as it gave the Commerce Clause a much broader interpretation to allow the Federal government to regulate labor relations, and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which said that states could pass and enforce minimum wage laws.
I could go on, into the Civil Rights Era and subsequent developments which changed the effective meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments by ending Jim Crow, the broadening of what “free speech” effectively means, and maybe even the 55 mph speed limit, but I’ll let this overlong post stand as something for someone else to out-pedant. Just know that once you dump the July 4, 1776 founding date, you get into something that would require more than a mere doctoral thesis to sort out.
If I may add my 2₵. I was in Alghero (Island of Sardegna), Italy in the first week of October 1989 for, of all things, the International Landfill Conference (please no comments). There were people from all over including a large number of professionals from behind the Iron Curtain. For 5 nights at dinner we would be randomly seated with different groups of people and I remember the following topics related to the Iron Curtain (Soviet Bloc) countries:
[ul]
[li]Attendees from Czechoslovakia commented on how the Soviets had opened the border crossings and were allowing citizens to leave for the West. Most of the people leaving were professionals (doctors, skilled laborers, engineers,etc).[/li][li]Attendees from East Germany commented on the same state of affairs noting that the exodus of professionals was significant.[/li][li]Attendees from West Germany were pissed off because all of these professionals were coming to West Germany and willing to work for substantially lower salaries than their West German counterparts.[/li][li]Attendees from Poland, while not commenting on the flight of citizens, noted that the Polish government (and by extension the Soviets) had become significantly more lenient in terms of granting visas and other documents for travel to the West.[/li][/ul]
What I heard throughout the week was that, if left at its present rate, Czechoslovakia, Romania and East Germany would be left with very few doctors, engineers, scientists and skilled laborers and people from those countries not wanting to leave were concerned about their future since they feared that the Soviets would decide that enough is enough and retaliate or (worse yet in the minds of many) they would just relinquish authority and walk away.
Within two weeks of returning to the US, the borders were open and, as pointed out, the Wall was rendered insignificant.
I borrowed mine from a couple of kids down the street. Then I proceeded to ask the cops standing right there if they cared. I’m still not sure if I got my German right or not. The differences from the east and west were still apparent in April of 93.