What brought about the end of the Cold War?

A strong case can be made for the importance of individuals in bringing about the end of the cold war. Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States in 1980. He was strongly anti-communist and called the Soviet Union the "evil empire". America's 1980's Cold War policy is charactersied by Reagan's increased spending on defence - this brought about the development of the Neutron Bomb, Cruise Missiles and the Star Wars defence system which used space satelites. It can be argued that Reagan's strong stance prompted the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union realised they could not afford to go on with it.
Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he represented a move away from hard-line communism and was famously dubed a person with whom the west "could do buisness with" by Margaret Thatcher. Gorbachev withdrew Soviet support from the controversial Afghanistan War which had earlier caused a rift between the US and the USSR, with America boycotting the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. In addition, he realised that the USSR could no longer afford the nuclear arms race and opened the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) with the US, signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. His relaxation of Soviet government policy through programs such as Perestroika and Glasnost, encouraged revolutions in Eastern Eruope. Free elections were held in Poland in June 1989 where Lech Walesa became the first non-communist president of Poland. This was followed by a series of revolutions which culminated in the falling of the Berlin wall in November 1989. The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991.