Obama seeking to exorcise Cold War ghosts in Moscow

“But at a less high level in the administration there are many officials who have not renounced the ideas of the past.”

Cold War-era U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told Russia's Interfax news agency ahead of the visit that the United States and Russia “still have some very different views on how the world should be organized.”

Obama will be following the trail blazed by Richard Nixon on May 22, 1972 when he stepped off a plane at Vnukovo airport southwest of Moscow to become the first U.S. president to visit the Soviet Union.

Nixon made a repeat visit in 1974 -- on both occasions sleeping in an apartment within the Kremlin -- but it would be another 14 years before Ronald Reagan in 1988 became the next U.S. President to visit Moscow.

President Gerald Ford had held talks in Vladivostok in 1974 and George H.W. Bush visited Moscow in 1991, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A flavor of Cold War era visits was given by Reagan in his Farewell Address, when he recalled briefly breaking away from the official entourage with his wife Nancy to visit the historic Arbat Street in central Moscow.

“Though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names... But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd.”

And showing history still haunts the present, controversy erupted earlier this year when Obama's official photographer claimed a photograph taken of Reagan in Red Square in 1988 showed KGB-man Putin posing a Russian tourist.

Russian officials never confirmed if the young man with a camera slung round his neck was indeed Putin. In any case, the man seen as the de-facto Russian leader is scheduled to meet Obama for real, at a breakfast meeting.

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