Free Republic

Suzanne Massie first met President Reagan in January 1984, when US-Soviet relations were at their iciest: the previous year Reagan had labelled the Soviet Union the “evil empire”. Massie was not an academic, but she had written a book about Russian culture called Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia that had caught Reagan’s eye, and she was summoned to the Oval Office for a five-minute chat that lasted 25. She proceeded to tell him what his hardline, all-male, fervently anti-communist advisers had not: that there was a huge gulf between the Russian people and their Soviet rulers,...

ST. PETERSBURG -- Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's one-time adviser on Soviet affairs remembers him as the man who forever changed the face of Moscow-Washington relations. Suzanne Massie, Reagan's adviser from 1984 to 1988 and a Democrat at the time, said Reagan played a "very significant" role in ending the Cold War. "His greatest ... achievement was being able to make that break through and establish a human contact and relationship of trust, which was definitely not there before," Massie said. Reagan was the first U.S. president to build human relations between the two countries, which were locked in the...