.@BernieSanders Was Manipulated by Soviets as Burlington Mayor, Documents Show nationalreview.com/news/sanders-w…
As mayor of Burlington, Vt., Sanders was only one of several dozen mayors who already had or were applying to establish a relationship with a Soviet sister city at the time, in an effort to deescalate a possible nuclear conflict amid the tensions of the Cold War.
Asked by the Times to comment on the matter, Sanders’s campaign stood by the decision.
“The exchange between Burlington and Yaroslavl, which continues to this day, confirmed Sanders’s long held view: by meeting face to face, we can break down the barriers and stereotypes that exist between people and their governments.”
“One of the most useful channels...for actively carrying out information-propaganda efforts has proved to be sister-city contact,” a document provided to Yaroslavl officials reads.
Sanders’s written statements and comments at the time reveal a lack of knowledge regarding the level of coordination between local Yaroslavl officials and Soviet officials in Moscow.
“When carrying out propaganda measures abroad, the forms and methods of the information-propaganda work and its concrete contents must be approved by the Soviet Embassy and take into account the Soviet Union’s relationship with the given country,” a Russian document says.
Sanders traveled to Yaroslavl in 1988 with a delegation, a trip he has called a “very strange honeymoon” after marrying his wife just before leaving.
The trip left him impressed. “People there seemed reasonably happy and content,” Sanders told reporters in Burlington afterwards.
The trip left him impressed. “People there seemed reasonably happy and content,” Sanders told reporters in Burlington afterwards.
“I didn’t notice much deprivation.” He then wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, expressing his desire to start the sister-city program.
“It is my strong belief that if our planet is going to survive, and if we are going to be able to convert the hundreds of billions of dollars that both the United States and the Soviet Union are now wasting on weapons of destruction into areas of productive human development...
...there is going to have to be a significant increase in citizen-to-citizen contact,” Sanders wrote.
An agreement was reached and Yaroslavl officials then traveled to Burlington, but not before promising in a letter to the Kremlin that they would emphasize the “peace-loving foreign policy” of the Soviet Union.
Attached was a seven-point “plan for information-propaganda work” on their visit and with specific talking points for each member of the delegation.
