Pertanyaan

Read the text and answer questions number 12 to 14! The Cold War was the tense relationship between the United States (and its allies), and the Soviet Union (the USSR and its allies) between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is called the "Cold" War because the US and the USSR never actually fought each other directly. Instead, they opposed each other in conflicts known as proxy wars, where each country chose a side to support. The start of the Cold War in 1947 was due to a belief that all governments would become either communist or capitalist. The Western allies feared that the Soviet Union would use force to expand its influence in Europe, and was especially concerned that Soviet agents had obtained information on making the Atom Bomb after the war. Both groups of nations had opposed Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union had sporadically cooperated with Germany and shared in the division of Poland in 1939, but Germany turned against the Soviet Union in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and without Communist rule holding together the countries that comprised the Soviet Union, the USSR broke into smaller countries, like Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Georgia. The nations of Eastern Europe returned to capitalism, and the period of the Cold War was over. The Soviet Union ended in December 1991. Not all historians agree on when the Cold War ended. Some think it ended when the Berlin Wall fell. Others think it ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. What happened to the Soviet Union before the Cold War ended?