Dateline: 1985 As President Ronald Reagan begins his second term in the White House a little-known politician, Mikhail Gorbachev, becomes leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is a reformer who wants to create a new era of peace and co-operation with the Western world. He uses terms like "Glasnost" and "Perestroika" - modernist policies which involve a re-structuring of the Soviet state and a move away from the old tensions of the Cold War.