The tragic small-town girl who took on the Soviet Union – and won

Before a scowling Greta Thunberg there was a smiling Samantha Smith, and she changed her world. But it is unlikely to happen again.

Samantha Smith pictured in 1982. Picture: Reg Innell/Toronto Star

By the time Samantha Smith was born, 50 years ago this month, Yuri Andropov was all but locked in to succeed the ailing Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet Union’s sixth leader.

He was perfect for the role: a merciless autocrat never able to find room in his heart for the hopes of others.

As Ambassador to Budapest, Andropov convinced the Kremlin of the threat in Hungary and the need to invade and murderously suppress the 1956 uprising that began to cut strings to the puppets Russia’s leadership had installed there. Later to be the longest-serving leader of the KGB, he knew all the tricks for terrorising a population.

Andropov also oversaw the local communist response in which about 3000 Hungarian civilians were killed in the fighting and perhaps 350 of those deemed to have played minor roles in the uprising executed after show trials. Later, even Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy was tortured, condemned after a secret trial, hanged and buried anonymously face down with hands and feet bound with barbed wire.

Andropov had watched the violence from his embassy rooms, shocked at how quickly the one-party state had teetered. He vowed that wouldn’t happen again. As KGB chairman he oversaw the Soviet Union’s program of assassinations – local and foreign – always an intrinsic part of maintaining communism.

Samantha Smith is greeted by Russian Young Pioneers at the airport, Crimean Peninsula, Russia, in 1983.

It was in that role that he had agents infiltrate the Czechoslovak pro-democracy groups that in 1968 were agitating for change, events that would lead to the Prague Spring. Andropov insisted the Soviet leadership had to employ “extreme measures” against those who sought freedoms.

The Soviet forces invaded and killed 82 Czechs, mostly shot randomly by Warsaw Pact soldiers. Andropov had already used psychiatry as a tool to repress dissidents, and after Prague he expanded the idea and many judged “unwell” because they preferred freedom to Marxism were endlessly interred in one of the almost 400,000 hospital beds – an inpatient gulag – built for that purpose.

After Leonid Brezhnev fell ill in the mid-1970s following some strokes and a heart attack, he reportedly kept drinking heavily. From then, Andropov was the prince behind the power, including the invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979.

Ronald Reagan, elected at the end of 1980, had Andropov’s measure, and was aware of the stakes involved. On March 8, 1983, during a speech in Orlando, Florida, he said: “I urge you to beware the temptation of … blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.”

Yuri Andropov.

Andropov was stung by Reagan’s words and his nation’s brutish reaction ended in tragedy as a combination of malice and Soviet mistakes led them on September 1, 1983, to shoot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 with 269 passengers and crew on board, including 22 children under 12.

The Evil Empire speech stunned the world. Finally, a Western leader had been brave enough to describe the hell of totalitarian darkness in which so much of the world lived so powerlessly.

Following Andropov’s invasion of Afghanistan, the decade-old-Strategic Arms Limitation Talks went unratified by either side and would lie in abeyance for three decades.

But months before, a 10-year-old American girl, Samantha Smith, had been hearing about these rising tensions between the world’s most nuclear-armed nations, then seen Time magazine’s November 22, 1982, cover story on the change in Russian leaders that reported Brezhnev had “possessed more power than any other individual on Earth”. Now that power was Andropov’s. And Smith, from a small town called Manchester near the Canadian border in Maine, was worried. She had studied World War II and had read what a nuclear conflict would mean for the planet. Smith asked her mother Jane about Andropov: “If everyone is so afraid of him, why don’t they ask him if he is going to start a war?” Her mother said “why don’t you write to him”.

She sat down and did just that, addressing her letter to “The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR”.

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am 10 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 it if you would. Why do you want to conquer the world or at least our country? 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. Please lets do what he wanted and have everybody be happy too.

Samantha Smith

She had long forgotten about the note when a UPI reporter contacted her through her school to say that it had been published, with a translation, in the official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, and that Andropov had commented on it.

Smith then wrote to the Soviet ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ask why the General Secretary had not replied to her personally. Soon after, he did, in a remarkable and long letter that likened Smith’s courage and honesty to Becky in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book “well known and loved in our country by all boys and girls”.

Andropov denied that the Soviet Union wished for war, promised that it would never use nuclear weapons first (perhaps someone should remind Vladimir Putin) and that his country would stop their manufacture and one day destroy its nuclear stockpiles. He pointed out that the USSR and the US had together defeated Nazism as allies. He then invited Smith to Russia to meet children of her age to help her understand that they were all for peace.

Smith went with her parents, Jane and Arthur, in July 1983 – the Evil Empire speech was just weeks old – and, briefly her freckle-face beaming optimism made her the most famous girl on the planet. She visited Moscow and attended a school camp at Artek on the Black Sea, a Ukrainian town in Crimea which was violently annexed by Russia 2014.

US president Ronald Reagan, left, and General Secretary of the Central Commission of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Artek camp was the Soviet Union’s most famous, and Smith was the guest of honour. Previous guests had included the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, Fidel Castro, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Jawaharlal Nehru and American singer Paul Robeson, perhaps the most pro-communist American of the era.

A phalanx of reporters followed Smith as she visited Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square, attended the Bolshoi Ballet and spoke to Valentina Tereshkova who, 10 years earlier, had become the first women in space. Every day for two weeks Smith’s trip to Russia made news on the country’s two television stations.

At Artek, Smith had made a particular friend in English-speaking Natasha Kashirina, whose family showed Smith around their hometown, the majestic former imperial capital of St Peterburg.

Kashirina acted as an interpreter as the Russian children peppered their guest with questions. She recalled: “Samantha was a curious child and wanted to know and see everything! Every aspect of our lives was of interest to her … My friends and I had a million questions for Samantha in return. We wanted to know about her home, her school, her friends, what games they enjoyed.”

Smith became convinced of the peaceful hope of her hosts: “Some people have the wrong impression about the Soviets, they want peace like I do.”

But she never met Andropov. Unknown to the outside world he had fallen seriously ill and had just six months to live, but they spoke by phone when she was in Moscow. Andropov would be replaced by the already ailing hardliner Konstantin Chernenko, but on his death the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev took over, and he had been moved by Smith’s visit.

On Smith’s return to the US, she appeared on the nightly news shows, wrote a book, Journey to the Soviet Union, with her father, and addressed the International Children’s Symposium in Kobe, Japan, where she proposed that Soviet leaders and their US counterparts should host annual visits by each other’s granddaughters, reasoning that they “wouldn’t want to send a bomb to a country his granddaughter would be visiting”.

Both countries named her as a goodwill ambassador and she was given her own show to interview some of the 1984 presidential candidates. She also won some acting parts and a role in a short television series, Lime Street, in which she played actor Robert Wagner’s daughter. About this time she also acquired another common fixture of fame in America – a stalker, Robert Bardo, who later would stalk and murder actor Rebecca Schaeffer.

On August 25, 1985, Smith and her father were returning from Boston after filming an episode of Lime Street when the commuter jet in which they were travelling – piloted by an inexperienced crew – fell short of the runway at a Maine airport and crashed into trees, killing all eight aboard.

More than 1000 people attended the Smiths’ funeral, including Wagner and the Soviet ambassador representing Gorbachev, and she soon had her portrait placed on a stamp and a laneway in Artek named after her.

Reagan and Gorbachev at St. Catherine's Hall, Kremlin Place, in Moscow.

The Russians also named an asteroid in her honour and statues of Smith were erected in Moscow and Maine; the latter has her releasing a dove and with a bear cub resting at her feet. The first Monday in June is Samantha Smith Day in her home state. Her mother launched a foundation in Smith’s name to foster exchanges of students, and Kashirina was one of the first.

Both Reagan and Gorbachev sent messages of condolence to Smith’s mother. Reagan’s read: “Perhaps you can take some measure of comfort in the knowledge that millions of Americans, indeed millions of people, share the burdens of your grief. They also will cherish and remember Samantha, her smile, her idealism and unaffected sweetness of spirit.”

Gorbachev wrote: “Everyone in the Soviet Union who has known Samantha Smith will forever remember the image of the American girl who, like millions of Soviet young men and women, dreamt about peace, and about friendship between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

Weeks later the leaders jointly announced they would meet for the first time. The historic encounter to discuss arms control took place in Geneva that November and marked the first step in the thawing of the Cold War.

But that was then.