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.
The just-married socialist mayor from Vermont was on what he called “a very strange honeymoon,” an official 10-day visit to the communist country, and he was enthralled with the hospitality and the lessons that could be brought home.
“Let’s take the strengths of both systems,” he said upon completing the trip. “Let’s learn from each other.”
The Soviet sojourn has long been an extraordinary, if little understood, chapter in Sanders lore. He has for years used it to help explain his views about foreign policy, citing it as recently as last month.
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.
Until now, however, relatively few details about the trip have emerged, and most accounts have relied heavily on Sanders’s recollection. An examination by The Washington Post of the trip — based on interviews with five people who accompanied Sanders, as well as audio and video of it — provides a fresh look at this formative time for Sanders, foreshadowing much of what animates his presidential bid.
As he campaigns for president a second time, Sanders, an Independent who is running in the Democratic primaries, takes credit for moving the party to the left, and he now finds himself competing with candidates who advocate for the kind of activist government positions Sanders touted during his Soviet trip, such as government-sponsored health care for all.
As he stood on Soviet soil, Sanders, then 46 years old, criticized the cost of housing and health care in the United States, while lauding the lower prices — but not the quality — of that available in the Soviet Union. Then, at a banquet attended by about 100 people, Sanders blasted the way the United States had intervened in other countries, stunning one of those who had accompanied him.
“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 declined to be interviewed for this report. Jeff Weaver, his senior adviser, said the trip fits into Sanders’s effort to form partnerships between people who may seem at odds with each other.
“Just like his politics in the U.S. are animated by bringing ordinary people together,” Weaver said, 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.”
Sanders has often emphasized the difference between his views as a democratic socialist and communist dogma, noting that he supports democratic elections and business enterprises that were inimical to the Soviet system. Sanders, who in 1988 had been mayor of Burlington for seven years, took the trip at a time when he was trying to put himself on the national stage. He wrote that Burlington, a city of about 40,000, had a foreign policy because, “I saw no magic line separating local, state, national and international issues . . . How could issues of war and peace not be a local issue?”
He was already known as a firebrand on foreign affairs, finding much to like in socialist and communist countries.
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.
Sanders, in turn, said Americans dismissed socialist and communist regimes because they didn’t understand the poverty faced by many in Third World countries. “The American people, many of us, are intellectually lazy,” Sanders said in a 1985 interview with a Burlington television station.
The trip to the Soviet Union was, at that time, Sanders’s most significant foreign venture. U.S. relations with the Soviet Union were in the midst of transformation. Just before Sanders departed, Reagan traveled to Moscow for a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was pushing for openness and reform. As a result, Sanders muted his criticism of Reagan, praising the summit as “a major step forward for humanity. . . . What we are doing is actually the same thing at a lower level.”
The timing of Sanders’s trip drew much notice. He got married before a crowd of hundreds in Burlington. “On the next day we began a quiet, romantic honeymoon,” Sanders wrote in his book “Outsider in the White House,” jocularly describing the journey with his bride, Jane, and about 10 others.
“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.”
The trip had its genesis a year earlier, when Kelley helped arrange for a Soviet choir of about 30 girls to visit Burlington. After staying with local families and visiting schools, the choir performed for about 500 residents, and Sanders asked to take the stage. At one point, according to Kelley, Sanders pointed to the choir and said, “This is the enemy?”
The main purpose for the trip to the U.S.S.R. was to establish Burlington’s “sister city” in the Soviet Union. Kelley said he initially proposed that Burlington partner with Kaunas, Lithuania, but he said Sanders, who is Jewish, rejected that idea because thousands of Jews had been killed there by the Nazis in 1941.