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Suzanne Rohrbach
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Massie in 1984
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| Born | (1931-01-08) January 8, 1931 (age 93)
New York City, United States
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| Nationality |  Russia |
| Alma mater | Vassar College Sorbonne Institute of Political Studies |
| Occupation | Historian & academic |
| Spouses |
(m. 1954; div. 1990)
(m. 1994; died 2016) |
| Children | 3 |
Suzanne Massie (née Rohrbach; born January 8, 1931) is an American scholar of Russian history who played an important role in the relations between Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War.[1][2] She was granted Russian citizenship in December 2021.[3]
Massie is the daughter of a Swiss diplomat. She was born in New York and graduated from Vassar College, but also studied at the Sorbonne and the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.
In 1975, Suzanne Massie and her then-husband Robert K. Massie chronicled their experiences as the parents of a haemophiliac child, Robert Kinloch Massie IV, and the significant differences between the American and French health-care systems in their jointly written book, Journey. Journey followed her husband's 1967 book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of the last Emperor and Empress of Russia, whose son Alexei also was born with haemophilia.
Reagan first became interested in Massie when he read her book Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. She eventually visited the White House, where she became an informal messenger between the President and Mikhail Gorbachev and his administration. She also asked Reagan to learn the now famous Russian phrase "Doveryai, no proveryai", which translates as "Trust, but verify". Her importance in contributing to Reagan's understanding of the Russian people, assisting in reaching a peaceful end to the Cold War, was described in detail in a number of documentary films. She applied for the job of US Ambassador to Russia via a letter to Reagan but was rejected, as the post had already been filled.
A fellow of the Harvard Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center) from 1985 to 1997, Massie has also served on the board of the International League for Human Rights. In 1991 she was appointed as the only lay member of the Permanent Episcopal-Orthodox Coordinating Committee, which has conducted bi-annual discussions in Russia and the United States with hierarchs of the church, including Patriarch Aleksy II.
In 2021 Suzanne Massie travelled to Moscow to attend Victory Day celebration, and in an interview with Russian broadcaster NTV, she asked Putin for a Russian passport: "If President Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] finds it possible to grant me Russian citizenship, it will be an honor for me".[4] She was granted Russian citizenship on December 30, 2021.[5][6]
Suzanne Massie has made no comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
She was married to Robert Massie from 1954 to 1990, when they divorced; they had three children.[7] She remarried to Seymour Papert, a researcher of artificial intelligence and education theory associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1994 or 1995.[8]
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