Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington

Crushed in the race for governor, Mr. Sanders marshaled a similar base of support two years later, when he interlaced his 1988 campaign for the House with a series of high-profile gestures of outreach to the Soviet Union. He formalized a sister-city relationship that year between Burlington and Yaroslavl, a city on the Volga River, traveling there in the spring and hosting a Soviet delegation in Vermont just weeks before the election.

Mr. Sanders again walked a line between fostering kinship with a foreign people and admiring aspects of a repressive system. Conversing with Yaroslavl’s mayor, Alexander Ryabkov, Mr. Sanders bemoaned the cost of the Cold War to both countries. He noted that the quality of health care and housing was “significantly better” in the United States, but also less accessible.

“The cost of both services is much, much higher in the United States,” he said, in remarks captured on an audio recording. “In the Soviet Union, health care is free or virtually free.”

On his trip to Yaroslavl, Mr. Sanders also traveled for the first time with a spouse beside him — the former Jane Driscoll, a city employee whom he married that May, and who evidently shared his ideological enthusiasms. Returning to Burlington, Ms. Sanders announced on city letterhead that Russian-language lessons would be offered in the city. For a salutation, she employed an arcane euphemism used among socialists and communists: “Dear Fellow Traveler.”

Mr. Sanders brandished his voyage as a candidate for the House, saying such ventures, would “reduce the obscene federal military budget” and facilitate peace.

Mr. Sanders lost that 1988 race, but he would soon run for Congress again and win. And in the final days of his mayoral term, he would set up his next candidacy with a 1989 trip to Cuba, coming away impressed, by the Cubans’ “free health care, free education, free housing.” He acknowledged that Cuba held political prisoners and was not a “perfect society,” according to the Burlington Free Press, but added that the United States had problems like homelessness and illiteracy.