page_title: Samantha Smith
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Samantha Smith / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: USSR stamp, Samantha Smith, 1985, 5 kopecks Русский: Марка СССР, Саманта Смит, 1985, 5 коп.
context_page_description: Samantha Reed Smith was an American schoolgirl, peace activist, and child actress from Manchester, Maine, who became famous during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1982, Smith wrote a letter to the newly appointed CPSU General Secretary Yuri Andropov, and received a personal reply with a personal invitation to visit the Soviet Union, which she accepted.
  Smith attracted extensive media attention in both countries as a "Goodwill Ambassador", becoming known as America's Youngest Ambassador and subsequently participating in peacemaking activities in Japan. With the assistance of her father Arthur, she wrote a book about her visit to the Soviet Union, Journey to the Soviet Union, and later became a child actress, hosting a child-orientated special on the 1984 United States presidential election for The Disney Channel and playing a co-starring role in the television series Lime Street, before her death at the age of thirteen on August 25, 1985 in the Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808 plane crash.
context_section_description: Smith's contributions have been honored with a number of tributes by Russians and by the people of her home state of Maine. A monument to her was built in Moscow; "Samantha Smith Alley" in the Artek Young Pioneer camp was named after her in 1986. The monument built to Smith was stolen by metal thieves in 2003 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2003, Voronezh retiree Valentin Vaulin built a monument to her without any support from the government. The Soviet Union issued a commemorative stamp with her likeness. In 1986 Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh discovered asteroid 3147, which she named 3147 Samantha. Danish composer Per Nørgård wrote his 1985 viola concerto "Remembering Child" in memory of Smith. A diamond found in Siberia, a mountain in the former Soviet Union, a cultivar of tulips and of dahlias, and an ocean vessel have been named in Smith's honor. In 1985, a peace garden was established in Michigan along the St. Clair River to commemorate her achievements. In Maine, the first Monday in June of each year is officially designated as Samantha Smith Day by state law. There is a bronze statue of Smith near the Maine State Museum in Augusta, which portrays Smith releasing a dove with a bear cub resting at her feet. The bear cub represents both Maine and Russia. Elementary schools in Sammamish, Washington, and in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, have been named after Samantha. In October 1985, Smith's mother founded The Samantha Smith Foundation, which fostered student exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union (and, after December 1991, the ex-Soviet successor states) until it became dormant in the mid-1990s. The Foundation was formally dissolved in 2014 after two decades of dormancy.
  A 1987 episode of the U.S. sitcom The Golden Girls entitled "Letter to Gorbachev" draws inspiration from Smith's story. In addition, the 1987 film Superman IV: The Quest for Peace included a scene where a boy writes Superman a letter to control the nuclear arms race; according to Christopher Reeve, this scene was also inspired by Smith's story.
  In the mid-1980s, after Smith's death, a script was written for a television movie titled The Samantha Smith Story with Robert Wagner as producer. Columbia Pictures Television and R.J. Wagner Productions were reported to have agreed to produce the film for NBC, with Soviet company Sovin Film interested in co-producing it. Ultimately, Columbia Pictures Television decided not to film it due to lack of interest from any network.
  Speculation as to what a surviving Samantha might have done in adulthood was dismissed by her mother Jane as unanswerable in 2003, given Samantha was only thirteen when she died and her ambitions had varied from a veterinarian working with animals to a tutu-and-tights-clad ballerina. The notion, which had been put to Samantha herself in the eighties, that she could be President of the United States in adulthood, was dismissed by her in the Disney Channel special that she hosted, with the words "being President is not a job I would like to have".
  In 2008, Smith posthumously received the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award for "helping to bring about better understanding between the peoples of the [USA and the USSR], and as a result, reduce the tension between the superpowers that were poised to engage in nuclear war". The Peace Abbey has also proposed The Peace Literature Project in Honor of Samantha Smith "to educate students about peace and promote peace literature for school-age children in 50 selected pilot schools across the United States"
  Elliott Holt's 2013 novel You Are One of Them, uses the story of Smith as inspiration for a fictional character, Jennifer Jones.
  On the 30th anniversary of the plane crash in 2015, the Maine State Museum opened a new exhibit of materials related to Smith, including photographs of her time at the Artek camp, traditional Russian clothing she was given, and an issue of Soviet Life magazine with her on the cover.
caption: 1985 USSR stamp with "Samant[h]a Smit[h]" in Cyrillic
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