Throughout 1990 and 1991, Soviet-controlled institutions in Eastern Europe were dismantled. Soviet troops were withdrawn from Central Europe over the next four years--from Czechoslovakia and Hungary by mid-1991 and from Poland in 1993. By midsummer 1990, Gorbachev and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl had worked out an agreement in which the Soviet Union became a unified Germany within NATO. In November 1990, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most of the European states signed the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty also known as the CFE Treaty, which decreased the number of battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery, and fighter aircraft.
             By the summer of 1991, the United States-Soviet relationship finally rose to better terms when Bush and Gorbachev met in Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty also known as the SALT 1. Under SALT 1, for the first time large numbers of intercontinental missiles were outlawed. For his efforts to reduce superpower tensions around the world, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990. Domestic policy under Gorbachev was formed primarily under three programs, perestroika which means rebuilding, glasnost which means public voicing and demokratizatsiya which is another word for democratization. In July 1990, Gorbachev was involved in the founding of the Russian Communist Party, which became a combination of Russian nationalist conservatism and opposition to Gorbachev.
             In the summer of 1990, Boris Yeltsin, had been elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic. Yeltsin's May 1990 election as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet had made him the president of the Russian Republic. With tensions increasing between the center and the constituent republics, Gorbachev scheduled a national referendum in March 1991. On June 12, Yeltsin, whose popularity had increased as Gorbachev's decreased, was elected president of the Russian Republic w...