By 1989 the Soviet bloc is falling apart faster than anyone in Moscow can manage. This episode of the Cold War series M.A.D World tracks the final years of the USSR through archival footage and expert interviews, starting with Poland's break from Soviet control and the wave of free elections that follows across Eastern Europe within twelve months. A bureaucratic mix-up opens the Berlin Wall to crowds who start tearing it down by hand, while in Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu's attempt to crush the uprising against him ends with his execution alongside his wife on Christmas Day, 1989. East and West Germany reunite for the first time since the war. At home, Gorbachev pushes perestroika and glasnost to fix a starving economy, but the reforms arrive too late to hold the union together. By 1992 every Soviet republic has broken away, ending both the USSR and the Cold War itself. The film moves country by country through a single collapsing empire.