Is it true that when Reagan first met Gorbachev, he claims to have thought, “He’ll sell us everything”?

There are famous memoirs of Ronald Reagan on the Russian Internet - supposedly, having met Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time, he thought to himself, “He will sell us everything.” We checked whether Reagan really shared such impressions from his first meeting with the Secretary General.

40th US President Ronald Reagan attributed to These are the memories of his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev:

“When I went to a meeting with the Soviet General Secretary, I expected to see a comrade dressed in a Bolshevik coat and astrakhan cap. But I was introduced to a gentleman dressed in a fashionable French suit with a Rado Manhattan watch. Looking at them, I thought: “Yes. He will sell us everything!”

Although these memories differ social networks, V media and even appear in books, there is no reference to the original source of the memories. Which is quite strange, because Reagan left behind not only memoirs, but also records diaries, which he conducted every day throughout his presidential term.

On the Russian Internet, such memoirs of Ronald Reagan about Mikhail Gorbachev appeared either in 2016 or in 2015. It was not possible to find earlier publications with this phrase.

In 2015, the author Oleg Veschy mentioned the memoirs of Ronald Reagan in his publication “And now Hunchback! I said “Humpbacked!” on the literary portal "Izba-Reading Room". Text located in the “Prose” section, and begins with this meme picture:

Text - criticism of Mikhail Gorbachev. The author recalls video clip for a pizzeria, filmed with his participation in the 1990s, calls Gorbachev Gorbaty and claims that because of Gorbachev, “Jewish Masonic lodges” appeared in Russia. In general, the text is saturated with anti-Semitic rhetoric and Masonic conspiracy theories, and Reagan's memoirs seem surprisingly out of place in it. They are located immediately after the paragraph about the chief rabbi of a New York synagogue presenting Gorbachev with the Star of David, and before the author returns to anti-Semitic statements.

Perhaps the reason is that the paragraph with Reagan's memoirs ended up in this 2015 text later, during subsequent editing. Such a phrase looked much more appropriate in the text of 2016, from which it probably later found its way into the prose of Oleg the Prophet.

In 2016, LiveJournal user whale_roma published recording with the title “Alarm clock “Vostok M 822” and Soviet sets “Young watchmaker””. In the text, the author actually talks about watches and alarm clocks - that mechanical alarm clocks are better for health than electronic ones, where to get them now in Russia, and recalls how in the Soviet Union there were kits for creating watches. In the end, the author complains that “the domestic plutocrats, trained and educated by Michael Gorbey, now headed by Putin,” are now “slipping” cardboard astrolabes to children instead of high-quality Soviet sets. 

What follows is this passage:

“I have a lot of respect for Ronnie Reagan - despite being our enemy, he was an unconditional patriot of his Pindos homeland. It was Reagan who created tens of millions of jobs and brought the US economy to cosmic heights. This is what Reagan recalls about his first meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland: “When I went to a meeting with the Soviet General Secretary, I expected to see a comrade dressed in a textbook Bolshevik coat and astrakhan cap. Instead, I was introduced to a gentleman dressed in a fashionable French suit wearing a Rado Manhattan watch... Looking at them, I thought: “Yeah... This bastard will sell us everything!!!”

There is already at least one historical error in this fragment. The first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev did not take place in October 1986 at the famous summit in Reykjavik, which is considered the first step towards ending the Cold War. First time Reagan and Gorbachev met in November 1985, at the Geneva summit.

Ronald Reagan did not write about his first impression of Gorbachev during a personal meeting in his diaries. But that's what he is wrote a few months earlier, in June of the same year:

“There was Armand Hammer (American entrepreneur - TASS-Dossier note)... I saw Gorbachev face to face. I am convinced that Gorbi is not at all like the former Soviet leaders and that it is possible to deal with him. I'm too cynical to believe in such things."

It was only in 1988, after Gorbachev’s visit to New York, that Reagan wrote that “for the first time I really felt like he was a partner in a common cause.” And although both leaders later viewed their personal relationship as friendship, historians note, that, apparently, their affection for each other appeared later than the period of their first meetings.

In 2020, the same user whale_roma published another recording in his blog on LiveJournal. This time it is dedicated not to watches, but to falsifiers of history. And in this text, the user admits that he made up Reagan’s memories in the text about alarm clocks.

“In this story, I wrote about the meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik - there I invented and attributed to Ronald fake “memories” in which Reagan assessed Gorbachev at that time. The only truth in this story is that Gorbachev was really wearing a Pierre Cardin suit - such suits were sold in GUM and TSUM for 250 rubles... What Reagan thought about Gorbachev and his watch, the dog knows - Ronald did not write any memoirs, and he took this secret with him to the grave. But Kitisha went and wrote his “memoirs” for Reagan. This, of course, is very funny, but I am being quoted with all my might on the Internet and pictures and memes are being created, and so I decided to tell you the truth.”

Reagan wrote his memoirs, and it is not known for sure whether this user really became the creator of such a myth about Gorbachev and Reagan. However, there are practically no earlier publications with this phrase on the Russian Internet, and there is no evidence of this in the English-language literature. Therefore, with a high probability, a LiveJournal user could have invented Reagan’s memoirs, which became a popular fake.

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Statements by foreign political figures about Mikhail Gorbachev
2. The Reagan Diaries
3. Ronald Reagan. American life
4. “I am a former head of state, I won’t be able to eat pizza”
5. Kitisha is about falsifiers of history.