In 1990, workers installed a three-by-six-foot aluminum highway sign reading “Mississippi River” in Russian on the I-94 Dartmouth bridge between St. Paul and Minneapolis. It had been prepared by the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s sign shop in Oakdale for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the Twin Cities on June 3. Gorbachev’s motorcade passed the sign on that day as he and his wife, Raisa, began a historic visit that established a friendly relationship between the Soviet Union and the North Star State and signaled the approaching end of the Cold War.
On an unseasonably cold June afternoon, Minnesota welcomed the Gorbachevs, Mikhail and his wife, Raisa, to the Twin Cities. The greeting followed Mikhail’s morning meeting with President George H. W. Bush, where the two discussed foreign policy. At a Governor’s Mansion luncheon, Rudy Perpich announced the development of the Gorbachev–Maxwell Institute of Technology, an ultimately ill-fated international research institution tentatively funded by Czech-British newspaper billionaire Robert Maxwell.
The Gorbachevs then took a planned motorcade route through the Summit Hill neighborhood of St. Paul in a limousine shipped in from the USSR, stopping multiple times to shake hands with members of the crowd. Most approved of Mikhail for his glasnost (transparency) policies, but hundreds of people originally from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania protested for Baltic independence.
Gorbachev later met with Fortune 500 executives at the Downtown Minneapolis Radisson to encourage American investment, acknowledging the USSR’s economic shortcomings while warning that companies “that stand on the sidelines will remain observers for years to come.” While Mikhail was taking questions on Russia’s economy, Raisa attended a dinner with a family in South Minneapolis. She also accepted gifts from school groups and made an impromptu stop at a drugstore to ask about working conditions, maternity leave, and differences in quality between similar products.
After a brief visit with Control Data Corporation, a technology firm with longstanding ties to Russia, the Gorbachevs departed for San Francisco. Rudy Perpich, who emerged as the clear political winner of the visit, reported confidence that the visit would have a direct impact on international trade with Minnesota.