How did the cold war end?

The cold war did not end suddenly. It came about through the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, the President of the erstwhile USSR. After 20 years of scare tactics by the Soviets, he started with a policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Social issues could be discussed openly, the state stopped controlling the economy, and the countries of the East Block like Poland and Hungary got much more freedom from the USSR as compared to earlier times. In 1991, ‘Gorbi’ and the then US president George H. W. Bush signed a first agreement that both will destroy their atomic weapons. The cold war was technically over after this agreement.