page_title: Murmansk Initiative
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Murmansk Initiative / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Seat of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Grand Kremlin Palace in the Moscow Kremlin, February 1982
context_page_description: The Murmansk Initiative was a series of wide-range foreign policy proposals concerning the Arctic region made in a speech by the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev - on October 1, 1987 in Murmansk, Soviet Union, considered to be a trademark of his foreign policy.
  The initiative tied together economic, environmental, and security issues in the Arctic. Gorbachev's aim was to transform the Arctic Circle from being a military theater to an international zone of peace among the Arctic powers. The initiative was launched as an invitation for disarmament of nuclear weapons and establishment of an East-West dialogue around the Arctic.
  The Murmansk speech's goals paralleled Gorbachev's ambitions in previous speeches, like the one in Vladivostok dealing with Asia-Pacific relations and a later speech in Belgrade dealing with problems pertaining to security in the Mediterranean Region.
  The Murmansk Initiative was considered a major turning point in the Arctic policy of the Soviet Union and represented the application of Gorbachev's "new political thinking" in Northern Europe.
context_section_description: The Murmansk Initiative was heard and received positively throughout the world. It led to a restoring confidence in diplomatic negotiations in the European North which were lost during the Cold War, and laid the foundation for a fundamentally new arena for cooperation.
  Domestically, after Gorbachev's speech, the Central Committee on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) adopted Resolution 338 in 1988 titled "On Measures to Accelerate Economic and Social Development of the Murmansk Oblast from 1988-1990 to 2005." The resolution helped to boost Murmansk on the world stage in terms of authorizing new contacts through Sister Cities International and, more locally, allowing the city and its surrounding Oblast to become more involved in discussions involving other Nordic counties in the Cap of the North.
  However, Resolution 338 itself was not fully implemented due to a lack of finances and the growing disorganization of the USSR's national economy.
caption: Grand Kremlin Place, the meeting place of the CPSU
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2011:07:26 09:21:24", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4054", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1024", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "728"}