Suzanne Massie, former Reagan adviser known as ‘the woman who ended the Cold War,’ dies at 94
She was not on the list.
Suzanne Massie, an American writer and scholar of Russian history who served as an adviser to U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the final years of the Cold War, died on January 26. She was 94 years old.
Massie was the author of books including Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, which Reagan used to prepare for his meeting with Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit of 1985, and The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad, in which she profiled future Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky. She also made significant contributions to the book Nicholas and Alexandra, by her then-husband, Robert K. Massie.
During Reagan’s presidency, Massie met with him over 20 times, telling him stories of her personal experiences with Soviet citizens and advocating for more communication between Washington and Moscow. She also shared Russian jokes and phrases with Reagan, including the phrase “Trust, but verify,” and made multiple back-channel trips to the Soviet Union to deliver messages for his administration. A 1993 article in The Atlantic referred to her as “The Woman Who Ended the Cold War.”
Massie continued to travel to Russia throughout the last decades of her life. In 2021, she asked Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship in a TV interview on the state media network NTV. She was granted Russian citizenship later that year.
She remarried to Seymour Papert, a researcher of artificial intelligence and education theory associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1992.
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