Fact-checking is one of my superpowers. I love it. It comes easily to me.
Maybe it’s the sceptic in me. Maybe it’s the sleuth. Maybe it’s the researcher.
Whatever it is, I love a fact.
But I don’t just love facts. I get annoyed by statements that masquerade as facts – whether mistaken, misconstrued, misquoted, or misstated.
And, more often than not, I am moved to find the truth. Even if it takes me down a rabbit hole.
Like the following detour that I took to find the origin of the saying, ‘Trust, but verify.’
доверяй, но проверяй
For those of you who don’t know you’re Russian – sorry, I couldn’t help employing that too-common typo – that heading is ‘doverjáj, no proverjáj,’ written in the Russian alphabet.
For those of you who know you’re Russian but not your proverbs, ‘doverjáj, no proverjáj’ translates to ‘trust, but verify’.
The phrase entered the Western lexicon through Ronald Reagan, who learned the proverb from Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history who met with him regularly between 1984 and 1988 to teach him about the Russian world and worldview.
Just before the famous Reykjavik Summit of 1986 – marked as the beginning of the end of the Cold War – Massie told Reagan, “You know the Russians often like to talk in proverbs and there’s one that might be useful. You’re an actor, you can learn it in a minute, ‘Trust, but verify.’”1
Reagan took that proverb with him to his meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Höfði House – an equal parts quaint, odd, lonely, and haunted house with a fascinating history – on the windswept Reykjavik waterfront. (The place was haunted badly enough for the British Foreign Office to sell it in 1952 back to the Icelandic government, who, apparently, will neither confirm nor deny that the house is haunted.2)
Reagan first quoted the proverb at that meeting with Gorbachev in Höfði House in 1986. “There is a Russian saying: doveryai no proveryai, trust but verify. How will we know that you’ll get rid of your missiles as you say you will?”3
And then he quoted it at subsequent meetings, again and again. To the point that Gorbachev began to get tired of it.
He finally said something. When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed at the White House on 8 December 1987, Reagan said,
‘We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim, doveryai, no proveryai – trust, but verify.’ You repeat that at every meeting,’ Gorbachev replied. ‘I like it,’ Reagan said, smiling.4
I like it, too, despite having my own ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’ sit on my shoulder and complain, ‘You check every fact.’
- Nina Porzucki, N. ‘Suzanne Massie taught President Ronald Reagan this important Russian phrase: ‘Trust, but verify’. The World. March 6, 2014. https://theworld.org/stories/2014/03/07/suzanne-massie-taught-president-ronald-reagan-russian-phrase-trust-verify, Accessed 20 June 2024.
- ‘The Ghost in Höfði House in Reykjavik’. Moon Mausoleum. https://moonmausoleum.com/the-ghost-in-hofdi-house-in-reykjavik/#google_vignette, accessed 20 June 2024.
- Schultz, G. Chapter 36, ‘What Really Happened at Reykjavik?’ Turmoil & Triumph, quoted by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110620, accessed 20 June 2024.
- Watson, W.D. (2011). ‘Trust, but Verify: Reagan, Gorbachev, and the INF Treaty’. The Hilltop Review. 5(1); Article available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/hilltopreview/vol5/iss1/5
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