, an American writer, met with President Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987. She taught him the Russian proverb Doveryai, no proveryai, advising him that "The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few. You are an actor – you can learn them very quickly." The proverb was adopted as a signature phrase by Reagan, who used it frequently when discussing U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. Using proverbs that the Russians could relate to may or may not have helped relations between the two leaders. After Reagan used the phrase to emphasize "the extensive verification procedures that would enable both sides to monitor compliance with the treaty", at the signing of the INF Treaty, on 8 December 1987, his counterpart General SecretaryMikhail Gorbachev responded, "You repeat that at every meeting". To this, Reagan answered, "I like it". While Reagan quoted Russian proverbs, Gorbachev quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been popular in the USSR when Gorbachev was in college, saying that "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." Following the 2013 Ghouta attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry told a news conference in Geneva that the United States and Russia had agreed on a framework to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons. He said "President Reagan's old adage about 'trust but verify'... is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard that says 'verify and verify'."
Influence
In 1995, the similar phrase "Trust and Verify" was used as the motto of the On-Site Inspection Agency. In 2000, David T. Lindgren's book about how interpretation, or imagery analysis, of aerial and satellite images of the Soviet Union played a key role in superpowers and in arms control during the Cold War was titled Trust But Verify: Imagery Analysis in the Cold War. In 2001, the National Infrastructure Protection Center, a national critical infrastructure threat investigation and response entity, published a paper entitled "Trust but verify" on how to protect oneself and their company from email viruses. In 2015, both Democrats and Republicans invoked the phrase when arguing for and against the proposed Iran nuclear deal framework. In the study of programming languages, the phrase has been used to describe the implementation of downcasting: the compiler trusts that the downcast term will be of the desired type, but this assumption is verified at runtime in order to avoid undefined behavior. In 2019, this quote was used in 3rd episode of HBOminiseriesChernobyl, by the deputy director of Soviet KGB. The phrase has been used in relation to India China border disputes and also following the Galwan clash during the 2020 China–India skirmishes. Variants of the phrase were also reported in the Indian media, "distrust until fully and comprehensively verified", and "verify and still not trust". On July 24, 2020, US Secretary of StateMichael Pompeo referenced the proverb in a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library saying that in dealing with China, the freedom-loving nations of the world must instead 'distrust and verify'.
Origins
The origin of the Russian proverb is obscure, though both Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin are reputed to have used variants of it.
