Pond hockey propaganda How Bernie Sanders’s nefarious Burlington-Yaroslavl sister cities program is still bringing Russians and Americans together in Vermont — Meduza
On March 5, the New York Times published a report and two accompanying behind-the-scenes pieces detailing efforts by Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, to establish a sister cities relationship with the city of Yaroslavl, then part of the Soviet Union. The report placed a distinct emphasis on the way Soviet officials aimed to use the relationship to promote perestroika-era government policy: In Russian, the word they used was “propaganda.†However, as current Burlington/Yaroslavl Sister Cities Program President Oliver Carling argues, “the Russian term ‘propaganda’ refers to any centrally generated message propagated to an audience. Thus, in Russian, one can refer to a public health campaign against smoking as ‘anti-smoking propaganda’ without pejorative connotation.†He did acknowledge, however, that “to be sure, Soviet and U.S. officials, including President Ronald Reagan, hoped that sister city relationships would serve as positive PR – propaganda in the Russian sense – and contribute to understanding and more peaceful relations.†To learn how the red scare of citizen diplomacy continues to scourge present-day Vermont, Meduza asked Carling to describe the most recent collaboration between Burlington and Yaroslavl: A traditional pond hockey tournament attended by the Bears, an amateur Yaroslavl hockey team.
Oliver S. Carling
President, Burlington/Yaroslavl Sister Cities Program, Inc.
The late 1980s were an exciting and promising time in U.S.-Soviet relations. The Soviet Union was opening up, and after decades of persistent fear of nuclear war, there was hope for the beginning of a new era of peaceful relations and cooperation. Many Americans were visiting the USSR on missions of peace in those days, including President Reagan himself and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. It was more difficult for Soviet citizens to travel to the U.S. A delegation from Yaroslavl managed to come to Burlington in fall 1988, and as then-mayor Bernie Sanders and the visiting officials were signing documents that formalized the sister city relationship, I was taking my first Russian course as an undergraduate at nearby University of Vermont. Since then, over the decades, the Burlington-Yaroslavl program has facilitated exchanges among jazz and youth orchestra musicians, a theater troupe, students, business people, architects, doctors and nurses, journalists, librarians, firefighters — ordinary citizens from many walks of life and professions.
Read more at: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/03/14/pond-hockey-propaganda
Fascinating for Bernie Maniacs.
You know, I can see a little bit how, if one was involved in these sorts of good will missions, they could have, obviously, a more favorable view of a country.
