As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity

[brooklynite]

New York Times

YAROSLAVL, Russia — The mayor of Burlington, Vt., wrote to a Soviet counterpart in a provincial city that he wanted the United States and the Soviet Union to “live together as friends.”

Unbeknown to him, his desire for friendship meshed with the efforts of Soviet officials in Moscow to “reveal American imperialism as the main source of the danger of war.”

That mayor was Bernie Sanders, and the story of his 1988 trip to the Soviet Union has been told before. But many of the details of Mr. Sanders’s Cold War diplomacy before and after that visit — and the Soviet effort to exploit Mr. Sanders’s antiwar agenda for their own propaganda purposes — have largely remained out of sight.

The New York Times examined 89 pages of letters, telegrams and internal Soviet government documents revealing in far greater detail the extent of Mr. Sanders’s personal effort to establish ties between his city and a country many Americans then still considered an enemy despite the reforms being initiated at the time under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary.

[apcalc]

1. I did not doubt there were ties in 2016. Tad Devine/Paul Manafort anyone?

At least at the start.

[LexVegas]

2. Ugh. nt

[LaurenOlimina]

3. He was still right to do it.

Sister cities reduced tensions and opened the Soviet Union up to western ideas. Like so many other things, in this idea that they would show up the West, the Soviets were wrong.

[empedocles]

5. More than 'ideas' at stake. Powerful interests at play.

[LaurenOlimina]

7. Your statement is cryptic. Please expand.

[groundloop]

4. It seems kind of pointless attacking someone for something 32 years ago

[empedocles]

6. How about 32 days ago?

[thesquanderer]

8. ...and something that wasn't even bad AT THE TIME! (n/t)