The Day Reagan and Gorbachev Swapped New Year's TV Addresses to Each Other's Countries 🇺🇸🇷🇺📺

Описание: On January 1, 1986, something genuinely unprecedented happened on television on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American President Ronald Reagan delivered a New Year's address — not to his own country, but to the people of the Soviet Union, broadcast on Soviet state television. At the same moment, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev delivered his own New Year's address — to the American people, broadcast on US television networks. It was the first time a sitting American president had spoken directly to the entire Soviet public through their state broadcaster, and the first time a Soviet leader had spoken directly to the American public on US networks. Gorbachev himself, in his message, called it "a hopeful sign of change which, though small, is nonetheless a change for the better in our relations." The two leaders repeated the exchange on January 1, 1988, this time devoting most of each message to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty they had signed at the White House on December 8, 1987. The INF Treaty was a landmark of the late Cold War: it banned both countries from possessing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 km, and by the 1991 deadline 2,692 such weapons had actually been destroyed — 846 American and 1,846 Soviet. They exchanged New Year's addresses one more time on January 1, 1989. Three years later the Soviet Union no longer existed. The image of the leader of the "evil empire" delivering a New Year's address into American living rooms — and an American president doing the same in Soviet ones — remains one of the most quietly extraordinary diplomatic gestures of the late 20th century.

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