President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985.

1985
At the Geneva summit in November, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev endorse a policy of increased cultural cooperation and people-to-people exchanges between the United States and the USSR. The summit is a victory for East-West exchanges following years of public skepticism about their value. The summit begins an era of increased funding for Soviet and Central and Eastern European research and programming.

IREX signs an official exchange agreement with the USSR for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.