The exhibits include Jane and Bernie Sanders’s hotel-registration card a letter and a telegram from Sanders, in English, affirming his enthusiasm for the visit and the sister-city relationship a page-long, seven-point agenda for the October, 1988, reciprocal visit of Yaroslavl city officials to Burlington and a page of standard instructions for Soviet functionaries speaking to foreigners, reminding them to use every opportunity to reiterate the Soviets’ desires for peace and for the success of nuclear negotiations, then underway in Geneva. (Alternatively, he could have logged on to the Web site of Yaroslavl’s regional archives and tried typing “ Берлингтон”-“Burlington”-or “ дружественный”-“friendly”-into the search field, and he would have located the call numbers for the folder containing the documents from 1988.) In doing so, according to the Times, Sanders unwittingly played into the hands of Soviet authorities, who exploited his “antiwar agenda for their own propaganda purposes.” The reporter, Anton Troianovski, described the search for the documents, which involved taking a train, visiting the archive, and physically paging through catalogues until he found a reference to the Burlington files.
In 1988, Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, worked to forge a sister-city relationship with Yaroslavl, a historic Russian city a few hours northeast of Moscow. In fact, the story that unfolds is innocuous and familiar.
The language of the headline and the subhead promise disquieting news. Moscow saw a chance for propaganda.” (Seven paragraphs in, the paper clarifies that the documents, publicly available from a regional archive in Russia, were “previously unseen” insofar as no one had previously requested to look at them.) Sanders worked to find a sister city in Russia when he was a mayor in the 1980s. On Thursday night, the Times published an article titled “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity.” The subtitle: “Previously unseen documents from a Soviet archive show how hard Mr.
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