This question has been asked countless times since the collapse of the Soviet Union a mere 2 years after Reagan's presidency, which was built on the crusade of peacefully destroying the evil empire, a purpose that Reagan had already devoted decades of his life to. Historians and commentators of all persuasions have weighed in on this question for over 25 years. With an increasingly amount of previously classified material coming to light, more evidence is available to weigh as one seeks the answer, and the documents are indeed quite pertinent to consider. Most of them are minutes of top secret national security meetings where the weapons in Reagan's arsenal to undermine the Soviet system were articulated and put on record as top secret official administration policy. Perhaps most telling, however, is that all of these documents, only available during the last several years, reinforce one of the best works about this topic, which was one of the first. Written over 20 years ago, "Victory" by Peter Schweizer is an in-depth analysis of the Reagan administration's crusade to wipe Soviet communism from the earth, and in so doing free the tens of millions of people living in bondage behind the Iron Curtain. Schweizer's book is based primarily on personal interviews with the individuals involved in this strategy. While these individuals didn't directly release classified information, they released enough information to validate the thesis of Schweizer's book, and their information--offered in broad generalizations--have been validated and strengthened with the wealth of material becoming available confirming what they have said.
As I have sought to answer the original question regarding Reagan's role in ending the Cold War, I have analyzed dozens of published works regarding this topic, many of them unedited primary sources, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that Ronald Reagan did facilitate the end of the Cold War. While arguments can be made that the Soviet Union would have collapsed eventually, the same argument could be made that they could have survived their economic setbacks without the pressure from Reagan and emerged even stronger (indeed, many of Reagan's opponents and leading academics were making these arguments in the late 1980s, claiming the Soviet Union was too large to collapse despite its economic setbacks and its size was a strength that would insulate and preserve it). Whether it would have ended only 5 or 25 years later is beside the point--to me, the simple fact is that if Ronald Reagan had not been President, and aggressively pursued a crusade against communism, the Soviet Union would not have ended when it did. My analysis of the various works have led me to that conclusion, and it was frankly an easy one to reach based on the vast amount of evidence. In sum, Ronald Reagan's economic war (and it was all out war behind the scenes in the eyes of the administration) undercut the very foundation of the Soviet Union's ability to sustain itself. Often leading alone, against the advice of advisers and world leaders, Reagan sought to economically devastate the Soviet economy and force the hand of its leaders. Even Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was only elevated to his position as a response to the aggressive new policies which had already been affecting the Soviet Union for years before his appointment that were pursued by Reagan during his first term in office before Gorbachev's appointment.
For those that argue Ronald Reagan was merely in the right place at the right time, or was simply lucky, they often claim that Gorbachev, not Reagan, deserves credit for the end of the Cold War. Indeed, TIME magazine named Gorbachev--not Reagan--their Man of the Decade for bringing about such sweeping change to the Soviet Union. What they fail to consider is the degree to which Reagan influenced the appointment of Gorbachev as the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, as well as the fact that Gorbachev's major reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika nothing more than economic programs aimed to counter the massively debilitating affects that Reagan's policies were having on the economic health of the Soviet Union. Put bluntly, without Reagan there very likely would have been no Perestroika and no Glasnost, at least in the form that we know them. It is even quite plausible that Gorbachev himself would have not been appointed General Secretary, and this much is admitted by the Soviets themselves who were part of the process of Gorbachev's appointment. This is all fitting, of course, considering that a plaque sat on Reagan's Oval Office desk that read "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Reagan's satisfaction at the collapse of the Soviet Union came from knowing that the opportunity now was the reward of the oppressed, that freedom could now be enjoyed by those who had been silenced, and people of all faiths could now freely worship. He did not need to argue for the credit, and didn't. Indeed, he would be the first to deflect that credit towards those around him, including Gorbachev, and their all having been blessed by a higher power that simply enabled them to be the instruments in carrying out a more divine purpose to which Reagan felt he had been called to fulfill years before his rise to the Presidency.
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