Twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik Summit

     On October 12, 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Iceland’s capital Reykjavik. Of course, his appearance in this city was not accidental: 20 years ago on that day, he had a meeting there with the U.S. President Ronald Reagan, during which the two leaders discussed the issues of stopping the nuclear arms race and for the first time at such a high level set their sights on eliminating nuclear weapons. They failed to agree on those matters at the time – the obstacle that stood in their way was President Regan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the implementation of which would have run contrary to the process of nuclear weapons reduction. Nevertheless, both leaders saw the meeting as a success. “We looked beyond the horizon,” Mikhail Gorbachev said, stressing the significance of the agreements reached in Reykjavik to eliminate all intermediate-range missiles and reduce all strategic offensive arms by 50 percent. Those agreements later became the basis for the Soviet-U.S. treaties signed in Washington in 1987 and in Moscow in 1991.
   The former President of the USSR received a most warm welcome from the Government and the people of Iceland. At the Hofdi House, where the summit was held twenty years ago, he was greeted by the Mayor of Reykjavik Vilhjálmur Vilhjálmsson and Iceland’s Foreign Minister Valgerður Sverrisdóttir. In their speeches the Mayor and the Minister for Foreign Affairs said that the meeting between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War and charted the course to the peaceful future of humanity.
    The celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik Summit was also attended by the people who in 1986 occupied the posts of President and Prime Minister of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir and Steingrímur Hermannsson, the Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland Davíð Oddsson, who was at different periods the country’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and in 1986 held the post of Reykjavik’s Mayor. As Mikhail Gorbachev stressed in his speech, they all made a contribution to the preparation and the conduct of the summit.
     Later in the day, Mikhail Gorbachev spoke before a big audience, including members of the public. He made his address in the same hall that hosted a press conference twenty years before, where after the end of the summit the Soviet leader said: “Reykjavik was not a failure, but a breakthrough.” Time has proven the correctness of that assessment. Recalling the past, Mikhail Gorbachev also dwelled on the current problems, above all those in the area of security, which can be solved only when countries of the world pool their efforts.
The experience of the Reykjavik Summit, of the serious dialogue on the most complicated problems of today, is still relevant now. This was stressed by the President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson during his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. He briefed his guest on the initiative to establish an international center for dialogue and cooperation at the Hofdi House. This idea has already attracted attention of former and current heads of states; Mikhail Gorbachev also supported the initiative.
     The dinner at the residence of Iceland’s President was attended by Foreign Minister Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, the Minister of Fisheries Einar K. Guðfinnsson, the Mayor of Reykjavik Vilhjálmur Vilhjálmsson, the former President of Slovakia Rudolf Schuster, and other guests who came to Reykjavik to celebrate the anniversary.
    The events devoted to the twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik Summit were also attended by the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Iceland Viktor Tatarintsev.