Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cold War was a period of international geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc. It began in the aftermath of the Second World War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers. Instead, each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars, alongside an arms race, espionage, and propaganda campaigns.
The first use of the term to describe the post-war confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch on the 16th of April 1947. The speech, written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, proclaimed, "we are today in the midst of a cold war."
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October to November 1962 began after deployments of US missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba. It is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war, and it ended when the Soviet Union removed the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba.
Major Cold War proxy conflicts included the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, which ended in a stalemate, and the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975, which ended in defeat for the United States. Both saw the superpowers backing opposing sides without fighting each other directly.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the USSR and expanded political freedoms, which contributed to the revolutions of 1989 in the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, ending the Cold War. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state.