The Little Girl Who Met Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov

Image: samanthasmith.inf

I don't remember ever hearing this story. On this day in 1983, ten year old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, with encouragement from her mother, wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of a nuclear war between their two nations.

Andropov replied with an invitation for Samantha to visit the Soviet Union that summer so she could see the country for herself. She spent 2 weeks experiencing a side of the Soviet Union seldom seen by Americans during the Cold War. Her visit was covered on Soviet TV every evening.  She was left with the impression that her hosts “want no harm to the world, just like us.”
Tragically, Samantha was killed in a plane crash just two years later at the age of 13.

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