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STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.

This week in our series, we continue the story of President George Herbert Walker Bush. He was elected the forty-first president of the United States in nineteen eighty-eight.

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George H.W. Bush was president when the Cold War ended between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War had lasted more than forty years. Both sides were heavily armed with nuclear weapons. People worried that one wrong move could lead to the end of the world.

But by the late nineteen eighties, the world was changing. The Soviet Union was dying.

On November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine, East Germany opened the Berlin Wall for the first time since it had been built. The wall had divided communist East Germany from democratic West Germany since nineteen sixty-one.

Citizens and soldiers together soon began tearing it down.

Tensions continued to ease as communist rule in most of the former Soviet republics ended by the early nineteen nineties.

Fifteen republics had belonged to the Soviet Union. By the end of nineteen ninety-one, most had declared their independence. They became a loosely formed group called the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Countries that had considered the United States their enemy, now looked to it to lead the way to peace and, they hoped, prosperity.

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As the Soviet Union was dying, President Bush repeatedly negotiated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. One of those meetings took place in the spring of nineteen ninety in the United States. It led to an agreement calling for both sides to destroy most of their chemical weapons. The two leaders also agreed to increase trade relations.

The American and Soviet presidents met in Moscow in July nineteen ninety-one. There, they signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START I. This treaty called for both sides to reduce their numbers of long-range nuclear weapons. They promised to cut the number by about one-third over seven years.

START I became the first agreement between the two powers to order cuts in existing supplies of nuclear weapons.

In September nineteen ninety-one, President Bush said the United States would remove most of its short-range nuclear weapons from service. He also said the United States would destroy many of them. The next month, the Soviets announced that they would do the same.

On December twenty-fifth of that year, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came to an end.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (WITH TRANSLATOR): "Compatriots, due to the situation, which has evolved as a result of the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of president of the U.S.S.R."

Six months earlier, Russians had chosen Boris Yeltsin as the first democratically elected leader of Russia. When the Soviet Union collapsed,