I discuss Suzanne Massie in my book and made major use of her excellent book “Land of the Firebird” as a source on the tsarist Russian period. Last summer, I finally got around to reading her memoir about her time as an advisor to Reagan on Russian/Soviet issues and how she’d developed her interest in Russia. I’d wanted to interview her about her books and reached out to the two different email addresses on her website, but never got a response. It had occurred to me that she must be in her 90’s and maybe wasn’t in any condition to give an interview. I’m sad that I wasn’t able to talk to her. She sounds like she was a wonderfully interesting woman who played an important role at a crucial time in getting a US president to see “the enemy” as human (as opposed to an ideological blob thousands of miles away) and having legitimate interests that had to be considered. – Natylie
Meduza, 1/27/25
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.
Thank you for this lovely article, Natylie. I am embarrassed to say that I did not know of Suzanne Massie and the role she played in the thaw of relations between the US and USSR.
It was also interesting to learn that she served as an editor and researcher for Robert K. Massie’s “Nicholas and Alexandra”, a book I read as a kid and which began my fascination with Russia. I will now have to read her book “Land of the Firebird”.