Was there any collusion? Let's read
this WaPo (hit?) piece:
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....
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....
Sanders... 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....
Throughout the trip, local officials took aside members of Sanders’s entourage, telling them that the Soviet system was near collapse.... On one of the last days of the trip, officials in Yaroslavl took the Vermonters to a workers’ retreat at an oil refinery for a classic Russian celebration: a trip to the sauna and a bath in cold water. Wrapping themselves in towels and then putting on toga-style sheets, Sanders and his colleagues gathered around a table lined with vodka bottles. A video of the event shows Sanders, bare-chested, listening in delight to Russian folk songs. In response, Sanders and other Americans sang the Woody Guthrie ballad “This Land Is Your Land.”...
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