The Cold War

After 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union, wartime allies, became rivals. Europe split along an 'Iron Curtain'; each side built alliances and nuclear arsenals.

They never fought each other directly. Instead they competed in space, in propaganda and in 'proxy wars' in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, which killed millions. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought them to the edge of nuclear war.

By the 1980s the Soviet economy was failing. Gorbachev tried reform, eastern Europe broke free in 1989, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved.