The article examines the influence of the Cold War on the general dynamics of the international relations in the second half of the20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on the reasons of the stability of this form of the conflict interaction between the US and USSR/Russia. Although the historiography extensively deals with the Cold War, the authors emphasizes that a number of issues concerning its fundamental characteristics remain insuffi ciently elucidated. Among them are the criteria for classifying any conflict or event as a manifestation of the Cold War. The article indicates the ways to find answers to some important questions concerning the Cold War, reviews its wide-spread historiographic concepts, and analyzes in its context such fundamental concepts of international relations as “sovereignty” and “security”. The authors offer the reasons for the continuation of the Cold War after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the bloc confrontation. Special attention is paid to the different phases of the Cold War, its transformations and the reasons that led to them. The research also answers the question of what factors influenced the intensity of the Cold War, intensified its heat and at the same time prevented its escalation into a full-scale “hot war” by a wide range of weapons of mass destruction. The authors express their point of view on whether the Cold War should be considered as a dangerous anomaly that threatens the development of the world community, or on the contrary, this global confrontation allowed to transform the conflict tensions between the world’s largest military powers into a relative strategic stability. The article highlights the issues in the history of the Cold War that require further study or conceptual clarifi cation. Particular attention is paid to the currently widespread approach of considering the most signifi cant confrontations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in terms of the Cold War.