Moscow State University Address (Unabridged‪)‬

On May 31, 1988, at the request of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, and standing below a bust of Lenin, Reagan spoke to and answered questions from a large audience of students and teachers at Moscow State University.

Reagan says “I wish you success” in Russian to the students on their upcoming exams. Reagan brings “a message of peace and good will and hope for a growing friendship and closeness between our two peoples.”

An information revolution is sweeping the globe that will transform our lives with robots, genetic coding, spacecraft, and other technologies. The key to progress is economic freedom. Entrepreneurs with the courage to take risks “are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.”

The Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, India, and China are seeing the power of economic freedom. Freedom “is the continuing revolution of the marketplace.”

Nations “must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist foreign policy.” “People do not make wars; governments do.” “Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists”, for example, Britain, Germany, and Japan.

Nothing would please me more than to see “a growing, exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to economic freedom”. In this Moscow spring of May 1988, we hope for a new world of reconciliation, freedom, and peace.

Following the speech, Reagan fields questions from the audience on a variety of topics: the START ballistic missile treaty, how young people have changed since he was a student, conflicts in Namibia and Nicaragua, the return of missing Soviet soldiers from Afghanistan, what’s unique about the U.S. Constitution, Reagan’s speaking plan on the mashed-potato circuit after retiring, American Indians, and Soviet dissidents.

Audio recording courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

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