Mikhail Gorbachev has died

I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.

He did. It's just that leftists in the US won't accept that and pretend that the Cold War just "ended" one day, because of the goodwill of the Russians, not because the US policy forced them into bankruptcy.

There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.

It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.

Are you responding to the right comment? That's sort of unrelated to the GP's remark (that Ronald Reagan can be credited with ending the Cold War).

(It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR, while most of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is better off.)

> Are you responding to the right comment?

I was adding to your comment, perhaps too tangentially - the GP remark may suggest that USA benefited more than USSR.

> It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR

Economical, cultural, political environment were greatly improved as the direct consequences of the end of the Cold War, up until ~2010, so I'm not sure why do you think the Russia is worse off. What metrics do you choose?