The Innocent Ambassador: Samantha Smith in the Soviet Union

The paper will explore the length to which the Soviet media went to cover Samantha Smith’s trips to the USSR. An unprecedented media blitz surrounded the young girl from Maine as she met with Soviet leaders, made friends with Soviet kids, and traveled to Artek, the most exclusive pioneer camp in the Soviet Union. The American media also covered Smith’s experiences, but they left much less of an impact on the popular imagination in the US than they did in the memory of the Soviet youth. So persistent was the Soviet media campaign that the Russian generation born in the 1970s still remembers Samantha. Yuri Andropov’s decision to invite her to the Soviet Union was an unprecedented PR move and the Soviet propaganda machine spared no effort to portray her as the poster-child of peaceful coexistence. Her tragic death in an airplane crash in Maine backfired, however, fueling conspiracy theories in the Soviet Union that the press stoked.