BURLINGTON, Iowa — Sen. Bernie Sanders told an Iowa audience Saturday afternoon that he did not consider himself a Soviet-style socialist after being asked to clarify the difference between his espoused ideology of democratic socialism and the kind of socialism found in Venezuela.
“I think that countries like Denmark and Sweden do very well. I think it depends on what we mean by socialism. If we mean socialism is what the old Soviet Union was, that’s not my thing,” the Vermont senator said in Burlington.
“If you think of socialism as what China is, that’s not my view. My view is that you have an economy in which you have wealth being created by the private sector, but you have a fair distribution of that wealth, and you make sure the most vulnerable people in this country are doing well,” he added.
Since announcing his second presidential run, videos of Sanders resurfaced of his time in the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, during a self-described “honeymoon” in 1988. Sanders’ wife, Jane, remarked at the time about how people in the Soviet Union aren’t “compartmentalizing their lives into a job and hobbies, it’s all interrelated and all under the banner of community involvement.”
In the 1980s, Sanders also visited Nicaragua, then an ally of the Soviet Union. A number of Soviet satellite countries, including the USSR itself, faced food shortages.
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how a bad country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing. In other countries people don’t line up for food: The rich get food and the poor starve to death,” Sanders said in 1985.
In March, former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt criticized Sanders’ praise of socialism on Twitter, writing that Sanders “was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures.”
