Bernie Sanders partied with Soviet officials during the Cold War, praising the Soviet Union’s culture and telling officials that he wished more people in Vermont spoke Russian.
That’s according to a new report from Politico, which viewed hours of previously unseen video from the 1988 trip Sanders and his wife Jane took to the USSR while he was mayor of Burlington, Vt.
During his visit, which occurred during an early thawing of Cold War tensions, Sanders feasted, danced, and drank with Soviet leaders as part of his initiative to make Yaroslavl, a mid-sized city northeast of Moscow on the Volga River, Burlington’s sister city.
Sanders brought gifts, including an American flag.
“If you’re wondering what’s wrong with capitalism, it’s made in Hong Kong,” he joked to Soviet officials, according to the report. “Sorry about that.”
At one point an official Sanders met joked on camera about the KGB’s practice of imprisoning political opponents or exiling them from their homes.
“Those who don’t behave move to Siberia from here,” an official hosting Sanders said, joking that if Sanders and other visitors didn’t behave then the same fate would befall them.
Sanders’ visit to the Soviet Union remains controversial due to the country’s adversarial relationship with the U.S., and history of repressing political dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities. While Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary at the time of Sanders’ visit, released most prisoners two years before the visit, speech and political activism were still far from free.
One of those released in 1986, Natan Sharansky, was force-fed and kept in solitary confinement during his nine years in a Siberian prison accused of being a spy. Sharansky, a Russian Jew, later became an Israeli politician.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author who spent eight years imprisoned in a gulag for criticizing Stalin in private correspondence, detailed gulag life in a famous three-volume work titled The Gulag Archipelago. After its publication in 1973, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and exiled. He coincidentally moved to Vermont, where he lived from 1976 until the fall of the USSR.
Tens of millions of Russians were imprisoned under Soviet rule.
But the tapes of Sanders’ trip reportedly also show signs of the economic struggle and political oppression the Soviet Union was known for, including people waiting in line for food and living in poor homes.
“In America, in general, the housing is better than in the Soviet Union,” said Sanders to his hosts.
Sanders has defended the trip as an effort to ease Cold War tensions.
