Samantha Smith

• 1. Introduction

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  Samantha Reed Smith was ten years old when she looked at the cover of Time magazine and asked a question that would change her life. It was November 1982. Yuri Andropov had just become leader of the Soviet Union, and the Western press was treating his rise as an ominous new chapter in the Cold War. Seeing the fear in the coverage, Samantha turned to her mother and asked: "If people are so afraid of him, why doesn't someone write a letter asking whether he wants to have a war or not?" Her mother's answer was simple: "Why don't you?"

  What followed was one of the most remarkable personal stories of the Cold War. A girl from Manchester, Maine, writing in plain and earnest language, would receive a personal reply from the leader of the Soviet Union. She would travel to Moscow. She would stand before the world's cameras. And she would do all of this before the age of thirteen, when her life ended suddenly aboard a commuter plane on a rainy August night in Maine.

  How did a ten-year-old's letter pierce the wall between two nuclear superpowers? What did the Soviets see in Samantha Smith? And what did it cost a child to carry the hopes of a frightened world?

• 2. A World at the Edge

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  Yuri Andropov arrived at the top of Soviet power carrying a biography that alarmed Western governments. He had served as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution, which the Soviet Army crushed. He ran the KGB from 1967 to 1982. In the West, his name was tied to the suppression of dissidents including Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and to the crushing of the Prague Spring.

  Beyond the man himself, the weapons race had reached a particularly tense point. Both superpowers were researching weapons that could be launched from satellites in orbit. NATO had deployed cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet Union's SS-20 rockets. The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War was in its third year. On the 20th of November 1983, ABC would broadcast The Day After, a dramatization of nuclear war so anticipated it became one of the defining media events of the decade.

  Large anti-nuclear protests were spreading across Europe and North America. Scientists and arms experts in the United States were lobbying President Ronald Reagan. The Soviet government had issued a statement declaring that preventing the militarization of space was among the most urgent tasks facing humanity. It was into this atmosphere that a girl in Maine picked up a pen.

• 3. The Letter and the Reply

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  Samantha Smith was born on the 29th of June, 1972, in Houlton, Maine, a small town on the Canada-United States border. Her father Arthur was an academic who taught literature and writing at the University of Maine at Augusta; her mother Jane worked as a social worker with the Maine Department of Human Services. When Samantha finished second grade in spring 1980, the family settled in Manchester, Maine.

  She wrote to Andropov in November 1982, at the age of ten, in language that was entirely her own. She congratulated him on his new job, told him she had been worrying about nuclear war, and asked him directly whether he was going to vote to have a war. She challenged him: "Why do you want to conquer the world or at least our country?" She closed with a plea drawn from her sense of faith: "God made the world for us to share and take care of. Not to fight over or have one group of people own it all."

  Her letter was published in the Soviet state-run newspaper Pravda. Having received no reply, Samantha wrote a follow-up to Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, asking whether Andropov intended to respond. On the 26th of April, 1983, his reply arrived.

  Andropov compared her to Becky, the friend of Tom Sawyer, calling her courageous and honest. He wrote that Soviet people knew the horror of war from lived experience, citing the Nazi invasion that killed millions of Soviet citizens. He stated that the Soviet Union had solemnly pledged never to use nuclear weapons first against any country, and proposed abolishing all stockpiles on Earth. He then extended a personal invitation: "I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer."

• 4. Two Weeks as Andropov's Guest

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  On the 7th of July, 1983, Samantha flew to Moscow with her parents. She spent two weeks as Andropov's guest, visiting Moscow and Leningrad before traveling to Artek, the main Soviet pioneer camp, in the town of Gurzuf on the Crimean Peninsula.

  At Artek, Samantha made a choice that impressed the people around her. Rather than accept the privileged accommodations offered to her as a visiting dignitary, she asked to stay with the Soviet children. Teachers and students who spoke fluent English were assigned to her building to help communication. She shared a dormitory with nine other girls, spending her days swimming, talking, and learning Russian songs and dances. Among the friends she made was Natasha Kashirina from Leningrad, a fluent English speaker.

  Samantha and Natasha performed the song "May There Always Be Sunshine!" together, an appearance captured in the documentary film The Capital of Childhood, made to mark the 60th anniversary of Artek. Cinematographer Nikolai Zherekhov later described her: "An ordinary child, she was no different from our boys and girls, maybe she was more liberated, our guys were a little restrained at first. I remember her extraordinary, kind, sunny, lively and sincere smile, there was no stardom in it."

  Andropov himself, however, was unable to meet her in person, though they spoke by telephone. It was only later revealed that he had become seriously ill during this period and had withdrawn from public life. Samantha also met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to orbit the Earth, and visited an experimental fruit station in Malen'koe village. Soviet newspapers and magazines followed her every step throughout the trip.

• 5. Ambassador Without a Portfolio

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  Samantha returned to the United States on the 22nd of July, 1983. The people of Maine welcomed her home with roses, a red carpet, and a limousine. A media circus had followed her throughout the visit, with Ted Koppel and Johnny Carson among those who interviewed her, and the major American networks filing nightly reports.

  Not everyone was celebratory. Some Americans at the time remained skeptical, believing she had been unwittingly used as an instrument of Soviet propaganda. The CIA noted in a 1985 report that some in the Soviet Union believed the opposite: that she had been silenced because she was too effective at building goodwill.

  In December 1983, Samantha traveled to Japan, where she met Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and attended the Children's International Symposium in Kobe. In her speech there, she proposed that Soviet and American leaders exchange granddaughters for two weeks every year, reasoning that a president "wouldn't want to send a bomb to a country his granddaughter would be visiting." The idea had a downstream effect: it inspired subsequent exchanges of child goodwill ambassadors, including a visit by Katya Lycheva, an eleven-year-old Russian girl, to the United States.

  With her father Arthur, Samantha wrote Journey to the Soviet Union, a book that chronicled her time there. The cover shows her at Artek, which she identified as her favorite part of the entire trip.

• 6. From Ambassador to Actress

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  In 1984, Samantha moved from diplomacy into television. She hosted a children's special for The Disney Channel called Samantha Smith Goes To Washington... Campaign '84, billed as a "Special Correspondent." The show covered the 1984 Democratic Party presidential primaries, and she interviewed candidates including George McGovern, John Glenn, and Jesse Jackson.

  When the notion was raised that she might one day become President of the United States, she addressed it directly in that same special. Her answer was unambiguous: "being President is not a job I would like to have."

  That same year she guest starred in Charles in Charge, and in 1985 she took a co-starring role in the television series Lime Street, playing the elder daughter to Robert Wagner's character. Her fame had also attracted dangerous attention. Robert John Bardo, who would later stalk and murder actress Rebecca Schaeffer of My Sister Sam, traveled to Maine specifically to find Samantha. He turned back after being cited by police, concluding he was drawing too much attention to himself. Her death, as he later confessed, ended his plans to pursue her further.

• 7. The Crash at Auburn

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  On the 25th of August, 1985, Samantha and her father Arthur were flying home aboard Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808 after filming a segment for Lime Street. On final approach to Lewiston-Auburn Regional Airport in Auburn, Maine, the Beechcraft 99 commuter plane struck trees 4,007 feet short of the runway and crashed. All six passengers and both crew members died. Samantha was thirteen years old.

  Speculation about the cause spread quickly. In the Soviet Union, accusations of foul play circulated widely. A CIA report from that year noted that people ranging from ordinary citizens to intellectuals seemed to believe Samantha had been silenced to prevent her from continuing her peacemaking work. The official American investigation found no evidence of foul play. Its report stated the plane crashed one mile (1.6 km) south-west of the airport at 22:05 EDT. It concluded that the steep angle of descent and the aircraft's speed and attitude at ground impact left the occupants no chance of survival. Investigators also noted that it was a rainy night, that the pilots were inexperienced, and that a ground radar failure had occurred, though the report described that failure as accidental, not uncommon, and not usually critical.

  About 1,000 people attended her funeral at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Augusta, Maine. Robert Wagner attended, as did Vladimir Kulagin of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., who read a personal message of condolence from Mikhail Gorbachev. President Ronald Reagan wrote to her mother Jane that "millions of Americans, indeed millions of people, share the burdens of your grief." Samantha and her father were cremated, and their ashes were buried at Estabrook Cemetery in Amity, Maine.

• 8. What She Left Behind

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  Russian astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh discovered asteroid 3147 in 1986 and named it 3147 Samantha. That same year, "Samantha Smith Alley" was named at the Artek camp. Danish composer Per Nørgård wrote his 1985 viola concerto "Remembering Child" in her memory. The Soviet Union issued a commemorative stamp bearing her likeness. A diamond found in Siberia, a mountain in the former Soviet Union, cultivars of tulips and dahlias, and an ocean vessel have all been named in her honor.

  In Maine, the first Monday in June is officially designated Samantha Smith Day by state law. A bronze statue near the Maine State Museum in Augusta shows her releasing a dove, with a bear cub at her feet, the cub representing both Maine and Russia. Elementary schools in Sammamish, Washington, and in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, carry her name.

  In October 1985, her mother Jane founded The Samantha Smith Foundation, which fostered student exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and, after 1991, the successor states. The Foundation became dormant in the mid-1990s and was formally dissolved in 2014.

  In July 2023, a bronze monument to Samantha Smith was unveiled at Artek. The inscription on its pedestal reads: "May There Always Be Sunshine" - the title of the song she had performed there with her friend Natasha Kashirina forty years earlier.