In a visit to the crumbling communist nation, the socialist mayor criticized U.S. policies on health and housing and lauded some Soviet policies. He remains influenced by what he learned.
Bernie Sanders six months after his election as mayor of Burlington, Vermonst, on Sept. 11, 1981. By Michael Kranish Michael Kranish National political investigative reporter Email Bio Follow May 3 at 6:00 AM Bernie Sanders was bare-chested, towel-draped, sitting at a table lined with vodka bottles, as he sang “This Land Is Your Land” to his hosts in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1988.
Then-Mayor Bernie Sanders, right, celebrates with officials from Yaroslavl in June 1988. The trip garnered brief mention in the 2016 presidential campaign, but earlier this year, a video from a Vermont community television station was posted online that showed a few minutes of Sanders’s unlikely celebration with the Soviets. Right-leaning websites suggested Sanders was cozying up to communists, underscoring how the trip might be used against the senator if he becomes the Democratic nominee.
“I got really upset and walked out,” said David F. Kelley, who had helped arrange the trip and was the only Republican in Sanders’s entourage. “When you are a critic of your country, you can say anything you want on home soil. At that point, the Cold War wasn’t over, the arms race wasn’t over, and I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Sanders had visited Nicaragua in 1985 and hailed the revolution led by Daniel Ortega, which President Ronald Reagan opposed. “I was impressed,” Sanders said then of Ortega, while allowing that “I will be attacked by every editorial writer for being a dumb dope.” At the same time, Sanders voiced admiration for the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, whom Reagan and many others in both parties routinely denounced.
Then-newlyweds Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, get a tour during their visit to Russia in June 1988. “It cost him some political capital when you are self-identified as a socialist and you go to the Soviet Union,” said Terrill G. Bouricius, who accompanied Sanders as a Burlington City Council member. “We knew there would be some negative effects of that, but we thought pushing peaceful coexistence was important.
Sanders then traveled to Yaroslavl, where he and his companions toured factories, hospitals and schools. During a boat ride on the Volga River, Sanders interviewed the city’s mayor for a Burlington radio show, quizzing him on the costs of housing and health care. Weaver, the adviser, said Sanders “looks back on it with great fondness as a moment of celebrating with other people.”“It would have been a normal boring kind of diplomatic exchange except we had just come out of the sauna,” he said. “I think we were probably naked in the sauna. I certainly hadn’t brought a bathing suit. . . . We were bare-chest with towels on.”
Ben & Jerry's Returning to Vermont, Sanders held an hour-long news conference in which he extolled Russian policies on housing and health care, while criticizing the cost of both in the United States — and boasted that he was willing to criticize his homeland.
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