She changed the course of the Cold War at 10, by 13 she was dead: The incredible story of Samantha Smith

How a child’s earnest letter to the Soviet leader led to an unlikely episode of international peace-building

Samantha Smith (centre, with bag) staying at the Artek children's camp, Crimea, 1983 (RIA Novosti)

As Jane Smith mourned the death of her husband and her daughter, both killed in a tragic plane crash near Auburn, Maine, she received condolences from two men she had never met: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In his letter, Gorbachev – who would soon meet Reagan for the first time in Geneva – described Smith’s daughter, Samantha, in the warmest of terms.

“You should know that millions of mothers and fathers and kids back in Russia share this tragic loss. The best thing would be if we continued what they started with good will, friendship and love. Samantha shone like a brilliant beam of sunshine at a time when relations between our two countries were clouded.”

The year was 1985, two years after Samantha made one of the most celebrated civilian diplomatic visits of her time: a trip to Russia, at the invitation of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, when she was just 10 years old.

In her own words, Samantha said that “the whole thing started when I asked my mother if there was going to be a war”. Her mother responded by showing her an article about the Cold War in an issue of Time magazine, and in December 1982, Samantha fired off a letter of her own to Andropov asking him the bluntest of questions:

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

Sincerely,

Samantha Smith

At first, she received no reply. But the following spring, her letter was unexpectedly published in Pravda, just after the US had announced its “Star Wars” missile programme and a couple of weeks after Ronald Reagan had used a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals to brand the USSR an “evil empire” – “the focus of evil in the modern world”.

According to the University of East Anglia's Matthias Neumann, a scholar of Russian history who has studied Smith’s story, the timing was anything but coincidental.

“The Soviets could ill-afford a return to an arms race. Publishing these letters was an opportunity to call out what they saw as American propaganda and imperialism, and take the moral high ground. In a Soviet quest for world peace, the aggressor was in the White House.”

This may be why Samantha not only saw her letter published, but also (eventually) got a reply from Andropov himself.

Having learned that her letter had been published in Pravda but not having received response, Samantha wrote to the Soviet ambassador to the US asking why she hadn’t been answered. “I thought my questions were good ones and it shouldn’t matter if I was ten years old.”

A week later, she heard that a letter was on its way – and on 26 April, it arrived.

Samantha Smith with her parents on her visit to the Soviet Union, 1983. (Sipa/Shutterstock)

“You write that you are anxious about whether there will be a nuclear war between our two countries,” Andropov wrote. “And you ask are we doing anything so that war will not break out. Your question is the most important of those that every thinking man can pose. I will reply to you seriously and honestly.”

Addressing her second question, “Why do you want to wage war against the whole world or at least the United States?”, Andropov answered: “We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country – neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government – want either a big or ‘little’ war.

“We want peace – there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.”

Then came the invitation. “I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children’s camp – ”Artek” – on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.”

Samantha took Andropov up on his offer, and after careful preparation on both sides, she arrived in Moscow on an Aeroflot flight in July 1983. Greeted by a horde of international journalists, she was ushered to the capital’s famous Hotel Sovetskaya to begin a two-week trip around Moscow and Leningrand’s top cultural and historic sites.

As Andropov had proposed in his letter, at the centre of Samantha’s Soviet tour was an extended visit to the children’s camp Artek, on the Crimean peninsula.

First set up in 1925 as a place for ill children to recuperate, the camp had over the years taken on a propaganda role, hosting visits from foreign children to project an image of a happy, almost utopian Soviet Union where child visitors could come together and see that the Eastern bloc was pursuing not nuclear war, but world peace.

This was not missed by more hawkish elements in the American media, one newspaper calling Samantha a “pawn” in a “propaganda war”. But her visit stopped short of the ultimate political coup for the Soviets: Samantha did not meet Andropov in person. It later transpired that he was severely ill, and would never again leave hospital before his death the following February.

However heartfelt the goodwill that greeted her in the Soviet Union, or indeed in the US when she returned home, the year of Samantha’s visit did not mark a high point in Soviet-American relations.

In September, the Soviets mistakenly shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it strayed into their airspace, killing hundreds of passengers, including many Americans and even a US member of Congress. That disaster was followed by a brush with catastrophe when a Soviet computer system erroneously detected what it said were American missiles in flight; it was only thanks to the actions of an on-duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, that a nuclear counter-strike was averted.

And in November there came the infamous Able Archer 83, a Nato military simulation that was mistaken by the Soviet leadership for the real thing. Soviet planes were loaded with bombs and nuclear submarines hidden under the Arctic ice while armed missiles were put on high alert. The incident is now held alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis as the Cold War’s most dangerous moment.

Yet just a couple of years later, there were signs the war was beginning to thaw. Gorbachev and Reagan met in Geneva at the first of several breakthrough summits; the Soviet Union would soon begin its transformation under the twin slogans of glasnost and perestroika, and just four years later, the Berlin wall would be torn down.

Samantha did not live to see the Cold War’s end. In August 1985, she was killed along with her father when the small plane they were travelling home in collided with trees and crashed on its approach to land. Her death was publicly mourned in both the Soviet Union and the US, with thousands of people attending her memorial.

Today, her name has largely fallen out of American cultural memory, but it lives on in Russia. As Neumann says, “the last Soviet generation grew up with her as the friendly face of America, as a friend of all Soviet children. Pictures of Samantha with happy Soviet children evoke feelings of nostalgia, of a sheltered and happy Soviet childhood that stands in stark contrast to the memory of the economic and social dislocation that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse”.

In 2017, Vladimir Putin visited the Artek camp to open a session dedicated to Samantha. In his remarks, he remembered how “the very best of young people used to come here”.

And now, with schoolchildren striking in protest at the world’s failure to face up to the climate emergency, she stands as an example of something more profound. “Samantha’s case is more relevant today than at any time since the end of the Cold War,” says Neumann. “Children can make history.”