Sanders trip to Soviet Union comes under new scrutiny

Source: The Hill | May 3, 2019 | Max Greenwood

A lengthy story from The Washington Post is shining new light on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 1988 trip to the Soviet Union.

The Post’s report, which was based on audio and video of the visit, as well as interviews with several people who accompanied the Vermont senator, includes anecdotes about the then-Burlington, Vt., mayor criticizing U.S. intervention in other countries along with the high cost of housing and health care in his home country.

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Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders’s presidential campaign, told the Post that the trip to the Soviet Union “was an example of that, if you can get people from everyday walks of life together, you can break through some of the animosity that exists on a governmental level.”

The main purpose of the trip was to establish Yaroslavl, a Russian city of about 600,000, as the sister city of Burlington. Sanders also traveled to Moscow and Leningrad, which is now called St. Petersburg.

David Kelley, a Republican who helped arrange the trip for Sanders and accompanied him to the Soviet Union, told the Post that the former Burlington mayor’s remarks at a banquet in Yaroslavl made him uneasy enough to leave the room as Sanders was speaking. Sanders rebuffed Washington’s intervention in other countries in the remarks.

“When you are a critic of your country, you can say anything you want on home soil,” Kelley said. “At that point, the Cold War wasn’t over, the arms race wasn’t over, and I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”

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Sanders’s trip overlapped in part with a historic summit in Moscow between then-U.S. President Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev — a meeting that Sanders hailed at the time as “a major step forward for humanity.”

The trip also took place just a day after he married his second and current wife, Jane Sanders. The trip was described by Bernie Sanders as “a very strange honeymoon,” according to the Post’s report.

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