section_path: Background/United States and the Soviet Union
section_name: United States and the Soviet Union
paragraph_text: United States and the Soviet Union
  
  By 1921, after the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, executed the Romanov imperial family, repudiated the tsarist debt, and called for a world revolution by the working class, it was regarded as a pariah nation by most of the world. Beyond the Russian Civil War, relations were also dogged by claims of American companies for compensation for the nationalized industries they had invested in. The U.S., while starting to develop trade and economic ties, was the last major world power that continued to refuse to formally recognize the Soviet government. The United States and Soviet Russia established diplomatic relations in November 1933.
  
  The United States and the Soviet Union, along with Britain, were the leaders of the Allies against the Axis powers during World War II. Following the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by the U.S., Canada, and several Western European nations, on April 4, 1949, a treaty that established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) designed to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
  
  The first bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Russia/USSR was a consular convention signed in Moscow in June 1964. In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by a multitude of countries, including the USSR and the US, and, while not having a binding legal power of a treaty, it effectively signified the U.S.-led West's recognition of the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe and acceptance of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that had been effected in 1940. The Act came to play a role in subsequently ending the Cold War.
  
  In the 1970s—1980s, the USSR and the U.S. signed a series of arms control treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), two Strategic Arms Limitation treaties (SALT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987); in July 1991 the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was concluded.
  
  In the late 1980s, Eastern Europe nations took advantage of the relaxation of Soviet control under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and began to break away from communist rule. The relationship greatly improved in the final years of the USSR.
  
  On December 3, 1989, Soviet general secretary Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit.
  
  Both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent, and the Soviet Union promised to reduce its intercontinental ballistic missile force by 50 percent. In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government. Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the president of the Soviet Union until December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, with the largest and most populous one, Russia, taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.