Back when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vt., Bernie Sanders wrote to a Russian official in the late 1980s about creating a sister city relationship. Communist officials in the Soviet Union couldn’t have been happier, viewing it as a chance to exploit that relationship and others like it for propaganda purposes.
The New York Times reports it examined letters, telegrams, and internal Soviet government documents that revealed in greater detail the extent of Sanders’ effort to establish ties between his city and a country many Americans then still considered a dangerous enemy.
Sanders’ desire for friendship fell in line with a goal of Kremlin officials to “reveal American imperialism as the main source of the danger of war.”
The documents also show how the Soviets wanted to use the sister-city exchanges as a way to sway American public opinion about their country.
“One of the most useful channels, in practice, for actively carrying out information-propaganda efforts has proved to be sister-city contact,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry document said.
All the documents are part of a government archive in Yaroslavl, Russia, which later became the sister city of Burlington. The files are open to the public, though archivists there said that, until now, no one had asked to see them, according to The Times.
The newspaper reported there is nothing in the documents to suggest that Sanders was the only American official targeted to be used in propaganda, but he is described in the papers as a socialist.
In 1987, when Sanders announced that Burlington was seeking a Soviet sister city, several dozen other American cities already had a similar relationship or had applied for one. By 1989, there were 36 recorded affiliations, according to Sister Cities International.
“Mayor Sanders was proud to join dozens of American cities in seeking to end the Cold War through a Sister Cities program that was encouraged by President Reagan himself,” a Sanders campaign spokesman, Mike Casca, said in a statement to The Times.
“The exchange between Burlington and Yaroslavl, which continues to this day, confirmed Sanders’ long-held view: by meeting face to face, we can break down the barriers and stereotypes that exist between people and their governments,” he continued.
The Times article published on Friday goes into detail about Sanders’ trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, which according to the paper, has been told before. The bottom line is that, in 1988, Sanders chose to spend his honeymoon in communist Moscow. Historian Lee Edwards wrote for the Heritage Foundation that Sanders visited Lenin’s tomb among other sites.
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