Who was the Russian leader that ended the Cold War and why?

The Russian leader who ended the Cold War was Mikhail Gorbachev.  He did not exactly intend to end the Cold War.  Instead, he instituted reforms that were meant to fix the Soviet Union and make it stronger.  The problem (from his point of view) is that the reforms ended up causing the Soviet Union to fall apart and the Cold War to end.

By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union in 1985, the country was in bad shape.  The Soviet economy had never really been anywhere near as strong as the United States’ economy.  This meant that it was very hard for the Soviets to keep up with the Americans in military terms.  In order for the Soviets to spend enough on their military to keep up with the Americans, they had to really cut back on what sorts of goods and services their civilian population could enjoy.  The country was also in bad shape because people were not happy politically.  They did not like how repressive the Soviet system was.

Gorbachev did not want to destroy the Soviet Union.  Instead, he wanted to make it stronger.  If he had succeeded, the Cold War would probably have kept going, if perhaps at a lower level of intensity.  To strengthen the Soviet Union, he introduced economic reforms (known as perestroika) and political reforms (known as glasnost).  These reforms were meant to make the country stronger economically and to make the people happier, thus increasing their support for the government.

However, these reforms backfired.  When the Soviet people were given some freedom, they wanted more.  They pushed for more freedom to the point that the communist government lost control of the country and parts of the country broke away.  This destroyed the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.

Who ended the Cold War?

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring the Cold War to an end. President Reagan knew the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to keep up with our increased military spending. He knew the Soviet economy wasn’t strong enough to survive a massive spending increase on weapons, soldiers, and military technology. He developed a strong friendship with Gorbachev and urged him to take steps to end the Cold War.

Mikhail Gorbachev realized the same things Reagan did. Gorbachev knew the Soviet Union couldn’t survive an arms race. He knew an arms race could cause the economy of the Soviet Union to collapse. Thus, he began a series of reforms that led to the end of the Cold War. There was a restructuring of the economy, called Perestroika, and an allowance of more political openness called Glasnost.  The Berlin Wall was torn down, and Eastern European countries were free to choose their own form of government. As a result, communism came to an end in many Eastern European countries. It was because of the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan that the Cold War eventually came to an end.

How did the Cold War end?

The Cold War did not come to an end by any one single event. Rather, there were a series of things that weakened the Soviet Union and the communist bloc during the late 1980s and early 1990s that brought the Cold War to an end. It potentially started with Mikhail Gorbachev when he introduced the ideas of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union. These were policies of increasing openness with the Western world and its markets. These were attempts to jumpstart the economy of the USSR, which had been floundering due to an expensive war in Afghanistan and an arms race with the West. However, these policies introduced ideas of free markets and capitalist culture into the USSR that would end up being its undoing.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and Poland elected a noncommunist government. This marked the beginning of the dissolution of the communist bloc in eastern Europe. The Soviet sphere of influence began rapidly slipping away. Other Eastern European countries soon followed.

By the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union stood alone and in a weakened state. A coup soon overthrew Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin ascended as the head of a new nationalist Russian government. By the end of the year, Ukraine and Belarus broke away. The Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist, bringing the Cold War to an end.

How did the Cold War end?

There is really no date for the end of the Cold War--some would put its end as 1989, when the communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed, while others would choose 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Whatever the date, the Cold War came to an end with the collapse of communism. This process occurred for a number of reasons. One was that the Soviet Union faced major economic hardships as it struggled to maintain its military power. The Soviet economy, it is often said, struggled to provide its people with both "guns and butter." Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform-minded Soviet leader who took power in 1985, sought to institute structural economic changes that were impossible to implement while spending so much money on the military. So he sought more normalized relations with the United States. He also encouraged a new policy of openness, "glasnost", in the USSR. When the countries of Eastern Europe, beginning with Poland, began to pursue similar reforms, many began to overthrow their Communist regimes. Gorbachev, unlike previous Soviet leaders, declined to intervene to stop these changes, and Communism quickly collapsed in almost every Eastern European country. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, with the Baltic state of Lithuania declaring independence, and others demanding it. Gorbachev was removed from power, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin to the presidency of a new government spelled the end of the USSR. If it was not over already, the Cold War reached a definitive end in 1991. 

How did the Cold War end?

There were many things that ended the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms in the Soviet Union and opened more communication with the West. There was also increased economic unrest in the Soviet Union, and it could no longer support its anti-Western military defense. Increased nationalism in Soviet Bloc countries led to independence movements in places like East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. The former Soviet Bloc nations declared independence. Gorbachev desired more peaceful relations with the West, yet he did not want the West meddling in former Soviet Bloc nations, as this would be a threat to Soviet security. Through a series of compromises that allowed the former Soviet Bloc countries to leave the Soviet Union while retaining strong ties—in addition to Gorbachev's willingness to enact domestic reforms and improve the Soviet Union's human rights record—the United States and Soviet Union established a better relationship. The most symbolic act of the end of the Cold War was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

How did the Cold War end?

The Cold War ended with the Soviet Union and the entire Soviet bloc falling apart in 1989 and the early 1990s.  The best-known date in this process was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989.  By Christmas of 1991, President George H.W. Bush was willing to say that the Cold War had ended.

To answer this question directly, then, the Cold War ended through a "surrender" on the part of the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union essentially gave up on its efforts to spread communism and, eventually, its entire commitment to communism.  It did so largely because its communist system was not able to give its people the material prosperity or the personal freedoms that they wanted.  Pressure from within that was caused by this failure ended up forcing the Soviet Union to give up the Cold War struggle against the US.

What factors led to the end of the Cold War?

The Cold War ended primarily because the Soviet Union, America's adversary in the communist vs. democracy struggle, had a revolution in 1991 and broke into 15 separate countries.  But that event was a long time coming, and the result of a combination of many factors.

First, the Soviet economy was weak from the start, but especially so after their war in Afghanistan.  Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the mid-1980s determined to tinker with and save the Soviet system, but allowing some free speech and private ownership only opened the floodgates.

Eastern Europe was the first to go, in 1989.  Peaceful revolutions (except Romania's) overthrew all of the communist governments in only six months.  With the European satellites gone, events progressed rapidly.  Some suggest the military spending required for the Soviet Union to keep up with Ronald Reagan's military buildup in America bankrupted them, but I tend to think it was the overall eocnomic system that was weak, and it ended because that weakness finally caught up with them.