1. CHAPTER 31
END OF EMPIRE

5. Postwar Europe. Western and eastern bloc competition, following their alliance in crushing Nazi Germany, crystallized in the Cold War. The Soviet Union annexed territories in the Baltic states and eastern Poland and set up a string of puppet communist states later known as the Warsaw Pact alliance, from East Germany to Bulgaria. The Western Allies formed the countervailing NATO alliance. The stalemate continued for 40 years.

6. COLD WAR
No physical conflict
“cold”
Espionage, threats
Proxy wars

7. The break-up of the Soviet Union
The break-up of the Soviet Union. The Soviet experiment with Marxist ideology crumbled, after seventy years, at the end of the 1980s. President Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (1985) allowed the nations of eastern Europe to move, largely bloodlessly, toward independence and economic reform, but in the Caucasus mountains and Central Asia reform was often accompanied by an insurgence of nationalism, organized crime, and power struggles. In 1991 these nations also became independent—except for Chechnya, where fighting continued for years.

9. ASIA
Civil War

10. Vietnam

13. MY LAI