Thread by @nytimes

Exclusive: For Bernie Sanders, his 1988 trip to the Soviet Union was an effort to build diplomatic ties. For the Soviets, it was the start of a years-long propaganda effort to exploit his antiwar agenda, documents obtained by The New York Times show. nyti.ms/2Ip6mWg

The Times obtained 89 pages of letters, telegrams and internal Soviet government documents that reveal how each side — Bernie Sanders, as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and officials in Moscow — tried to cultivate a relationship to serve their own political ends

Bernie Sanders, in lobbying to make Yaroslavl the sister city of Burlington, Vermont, aimed to break down “barriers and stereotypes,” his presidential campaign said in a statement. He said at the time that he wanted the countries to “live together as friends.”

For the Kremlin, these sister-city relationships were vehicles to sway American public opinion about the Soviet Union, the documents show nyti.ms/3cx1iNn

The documents are in a government archive in Yaroslavl, Russia, which would become Burlington's sister city. They are public, but archivists there said that no one had asked for them until we did last week.

Here's how @antontroian reported this story. nyti.ms/38vhdIS

All together, the documents reveal in new detail the extent of Bernie Sanders’s personal effort to establish ties between Burlington, Vermont, and a country many Americans then still considered an enemy.

Here are 5 key excerpts from the archive. nyti.ms/3axANpn