Communist society and Cold war | Quick Homework Help

I’m trying to learn for my History class and I’m stuck. Can you help?

1.What impact did Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and demokratizatsiia (democratization) have on Communist society? Were these principles compatible with collectivization and a command economy? Did Communist leaders favor these principles, or did they feel that their hands were tied once they were introduced into Communist society?

2.It would be easy to dismiss the Cold War simply as proof that Capitalism was a better theory than Communism. Easy, but not the whole story. In order for Communism to be relegated to the dustbin of history, it first had to be proven that its struggle against Capitalism was unnecessary and thus irrelevant. How did the US and the USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th Century to allow Communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

Each question needs answered individually. Each answer should be 300 words and have two separate references.