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Samantha Smith visited Moscow in 1983
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Samantha Smith statue in Augusta, Maine
(Photo by Sergei Chaparin) *
July 7, 1983: Samantha Smith visits Moscow. She was born in 1972 in Houlton, Maine. She wrote a letter to Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov shortly after he was given his new job. The letter, short and sweet, asked Mr. Andropov if he was going to call for war with the US. His reputation and press coverage, especially in America, was such world peace was in doubt.
Samantha's letter was published in Pravda, the Russian newspaper. As the Cold War heated up with everybody creating weapons of mass destruction or total annihilation, even détente was stressed out. Yuri Andropov, after a request from the Soviet Union's Ambassador to the United States, responded to the letter on April 26, 1983.
Andropov assured the little American girl that all in the USSR and he in particular was trying to avoid war by every possible method available to him. He declared, also, the USSR was not interested in world domination. He then went on to invite the little girl and her parents to visit. She and her parents spent two weeks as Andropov's guests, although they never personally met him. They did talk on the phone with him while they visited Moscow, Leningrad, and Artek on the Crimean Peninsula.
After returning to the US, "America's Youngest Ambassador" wrote a book about her experiences called Journey to the Soviet Union. In 1984, she was invited to Japan as a goodwill ambassador and spoke at the Children's International Symposium at Kobe. Here she asked for world leaders to trade grandchildren for a few weeks because a leader "wouldn't want to send a bomb to a country his granddaughter would be visiting." She also began working on a television series called Lime Street. On a flight home after filming, the plane crashed outside Bar Harbor, Maine killing all on board. There was speculation foul play was involved in the crash, but authorities found none upon inspection of the scene. Pilot inexperience and bad weather conditions seemed to conspire to end the peace activist's short life at the age of 13.
"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." – letter to Yuri Andropov
"Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. This is what the great founder of our state, Vladimir Lenin, taught us." – Yuri Andropov in response letter
"In America and in our country there are nuclear weapons—terrible weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. But we do not want them to be ever used. That's precisely why the Soviet Union solemnly declared throughout the entire world that never–never–will it use nuclear weapons first against any country. In general we propose to discontinue further production of them and to proceed to the abolition of all the stockpiles on earth." - Yuri Andropov in response letter
"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." - Yuri Andropov in response letter
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