Today in Apple history: Steve Jobs visits the Soviet Union

Дата публикации: 04-07-2026 16:45:46

On July 4, 1985, Steve Jobs visited Moscow, hoping to sell Macs to the Russians. Unfortunately, his trip served up more intrigue than results.
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July 4, 1985: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs visits Moscow for the first time, with the aim of selling Macs to the Russians. During his two-day trip to the Soviet Union, Jobs lectures computer science students, attends a Fourth of July party at the American embassy and discusses opening a Mac factory in Russia.

He also reportedly almost runs afoul of the KGB by praising assassinated Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Taking place shortly after reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev‘s rise to power, the trip to Moscow came at a tough time for Jobs. He had just lost a political war with Apple CEO John Sculley. And that left Jobs in virtual isolation after higher-ups running the company abandoned him.

Looking for something to do, Jobs went on an overseas trip to visit Paris, Italy and, eventually, Moscow.

In Paris, Jobs met future U.S. President George H. W. Bush. They discussed the idea that distributing Macs to the Russian people could help provoke a “revolution from below.”

At the time, the less-powerful Apple II computer had just launched in Russia, a country that remained very guarded about allowing technology to become available to the masses.

Steve Jobs, the CIA and the KGB

Intriguingly, Jobs said he had a “feeling” that the attorney who helped organize his trip to the Soviet Union “worked for the CIA or the KGB,” although he never elaborated on this in public.

The trip was, however, notable enough that it received a mention in Jobs’ FBI file. The dossier noted that while in the USSR, Jobs met with an unnamed professor from the Russian Academy of Sciences “to discuss possible marketing of [Apple Computer’s] product.”

In other strange happenings during the visit — which totally sounds like it should be adapted as a TV miniseries — Jobs apparently became convinced that a television repairman who came to his Moscow hotel room “unsolicited, for no apparent reason, was actually some kind of spy.” (Alan Deutschman told that story in his 2000 book, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs.)

Trouble with the KGB

The apparent trouble with Russia’s secret police and spy agency came up in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Jobs. Isaacson wrote that Jobs “insisted on talking about” Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader exiled as an “enemy of the people.” Trotsky was later assassinated in Mexico under the orders of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

“You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” a KGB agent reportedly told Jobs. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.”

Jobs ignored this advice, according to Isaacson. “When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky,” he wrote. (For what it’s worth, a partial transcript of one of the speeches Jobs made in Russia at this time makes no mention of Trotsky.)

The beginning of the Russian Newton revolution?

Jobs seemingly suffered no ill effects from his reported run-in with the KGB. Unfortunately, his trip overall seemed similarly uneventful. No Russian Apple division came to be. That probably makes sense, given that Jobs’ summer of 1985 was more about “busy work” to keep him away from Apple management than accomplishing anything productive.

The trip generated a final intriguing tidbit, though. Apple VP Al Eisenstat stayed in the same Moscow hotel as Jobs. One night, Eisenstat was awakened by the sound of a nervous computer programmer knocking on his door.

When he answered it, the coder pushed a floppy disk into his hand. Upon Eisenstat’s return to the United States, he discovered the disk contained accurate handwriting-recognition software.

According to several members of the Apple Newton team I’ve spoken to, this code became the basis for the handwriting recognition built into the Newton MessagePad.

More details on Steve Jobs’ Russia trip?

Anyone know any more details about Steve Jobs’ trip to the Soviet Union on the Fourth of July in 1984? Leave your comments below.

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