The Cold War was firstly between the Soviet Union and the United States their respective allies
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It lasted around 45 years - starting in 1947 and ending in 1991.

The war had several effects for the residents. Firstly, as military spending had major cuts in soviet Russia, vast amounts of people were made unemployed leaving the soviets in poverty and sadness. Also, after Russia embarked on economic reforms in the 1990s, it suffered a financial crisis and a recession more severe than the United States and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression.Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post–Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth since 1995. Also, in America there was much fear of nuclear attack devices being used, meaning Americans lived in dearness of inhalation of the toxins.

The separation of Berlin began in 1945 after the collapse of Germany. The country was divided into four zones, where each superpower controlled a zone. In 1946, reparation agreements broke down between the Soviet and Western zones. Response of the West was to merge French, British, and American zones in 1947.

The biggest cultural differences between east and west Germany, is the communist traits that the east possess. The east obey authority much greater. East Germany was much more controlled, and also much poorer. They did not have access to things like westerners had like video games or fruit etc. 

In November 1983, Soviet nuclear forces went on high alert. After months nervously watching increasingly assertive NATO military posturing, Soviet intelligence agencies in Western Europe received flash telegrams reporting alarming activity on U.S. bases. In response, the Soviets began planning for a countdown to a nuclear first strike by NATO on Eastern Europe. And then Able Archer 83, a vast NATO war game exercise that modeled a Soviet attack on NATO allies, ended.

What the West didn’t know at the time was that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real and were actively preparing for a surprise missile attack from NATO. This close scrape with Armageddon was largely unknown until October 2015, when the U.S. government released a ninety-four-page presidential analysis of Able Archer that the National Security Archive had spent over a decade trying to declassify. Able Archer 83 tells the story of the fateful NATO exercise through a selection of declassified documents that archive staffer Nate Jones has pried loose from several U.S. government agencies and British archives, as well as from formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, vividly recreating the atmosphere that nearly unleashed nuclear war.