Samantha Smith (born June 29, 1972, Houlton, Maine, U.S.—died August 25, 1985, Auburn, Maine) was an American peace activist and child actress, celebrated for giving children around the world a voice in the volatile Cold War during the 1980s.
In December 1982, when she was 10 years old, Smith wrote a letter to the new leader of the Soviet Union, Yury Andropov. Having learned from public television of the apocalyptic potential of the nuclear arms race then escalating under Andropov and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, she asked Andropov to tell her what he would do to avoid a nuclear war with the United States:
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
After excerpts of her letter were published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda in April 1983, she wrote to the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ask why Andropov himself had not replied. Andropov responded with his own letter later that month, acknowledging Smith’s specific question and the terrible nature of nuclear weapons. He cited his nation’s declaration not to use nuclear weapons first against any country. He also complimented her as a courageous and honest girl, resembling the character Becky of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and concluded by inviting Smith to come to the Soviet Union.
In July 1983 Smith and her family spent two weeks in the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, and Artek, a children’s camp on the Black Sea. After returning home, she gave numerous television interviews and, with her father’s help, wrote a book about her experience, Journey to the Soviet Union (1985). In a December 1983 speech at the International Children’s Symposium in Kōbe, Japan, she suggested that U.S. and Soviet leaders exchange granddaughters for two weeks every year, because a leader would not want to bomb a country that “his granddaughter was visiting.”
In February 1984 she hosted a television special, Samantha Smith Goes to Washington: Campaign ’84, in which she interviewed various political leaders about the issues in the campaign. Later that year she appeared as a guest star in an episode of the television series Charles in Charge, and in 1985 she began appearing in a new television series, Lime Street, in a regular supporting role.
In August 1985, while returning to Maine from London, where she had filmed a segment of Lime Street, Smith and her father were killed in a commuter plane crash. The Soviet government issued a postage stamp with her likeness and named a diamond and an asteroid in her honour. The state of Maine erected a life-size statue of Smith releasing a dove with a small bear (representing both Maine and the Soviet Union) sitting at her feet and proclaimed the first Monday in June to be Samantha Smith Day. In October 1985 her mother established the Samantha Smith Foundation, dedicated to peace education and fostering international friendships among children.