Religious Freedom in the Soviet Union

By the summer of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies glasnost' (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) had begun to change the political landscape of the Soviet Union. The U.S. and Soviet Union had made considerable progress in limiting arms build-up through a series of negotiations. However, when President Ronald Reagan visited Moscow in the summer of 1988 for a political summit, the U. S. expected further reforms to follow. One area in the Soviet Union where few, if any, changes had been made was for religious freedoms, with the Soviet Union trailing behind other Communist countries (especially when compared to the role of the Catholic Church in Poland). In this private exchange between the Reagan and Gorbachev, the U.S. President hopes to pressure Gorbachev into allowing greater religious freedoms, but without public pressure as the larger concerns of arms control outweighed this private matter between the two leaders.