[A] supporter trying to encourage Texas politician Beto O’Rourke to run for president has posted online a 1988 video of Sen. Bernie Sanders, shirtless and singing with a group drinking shots of vodka in the Soviet Union.
The video was in the archives of Chittenden Community Television (CCTV), a public access TV station in Burlington. It started making the rounds online after Travis Justin, who is part of a veterans group trying to get O’Rourke to run for president in 2020, tweeted it out, according to the Washington Examiner. That tweet has since been taken down, but the video has still gone viral.
BREAKING: @SenSanders like you’ve never seen him!!
Bernie and Jane on their honeymoon in Russia singing “This land is Your Land” with their Russian comrades!!
Trigger Warning: Bernie is sitting at a table shirtless in his briefs. So are most of the rest of the men… pic.twitter.com/2DPyDY2WV0
— m. mendoza ferrer (@mgranville1) January 28, 2019
The Examiner said Justin posted the video on his Twitter feed saying: “Recently discovered footage from 1988 reveals a shirtless Bernie Sanders with his wife, Jane, on their honeymoon in the USSR, drunkenly singing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ with a group of presumed Soviets.”
Sanders, an independent, is expected to run again for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
In the 1988 video, Sanders — then the mayor of Burlington — and his wife Jane, who he had married the day before leaving on the trip, are seated around a table, along with several other Burlington city officials and several Russians. They toast and sing Woody Guthrie’s classic. Sanders cannot be seen consuming alcohol.
The 10-day trip to Yaroslavl was a “honeymoon” for the Sanders, but the primary purpose was official city business. Burlington was solidifying a sister-city relationship with Yaroslavl, a city about 160 miles northeast of Moscow. Also on the trip were John Franco, a city attorney; Peter Clavelle, the director of Community and Economic Development, who succeeded Sanders as mayor the following year; and Terry Bouricius, a Burlington city councilor.
According to Franco, the event videotaped was a send off party/dinner sponsored by officials in Yaroslavl on the last night of the trip. It was held, he said, at a spa where the guests took part in a Russian tradition of going into hot and cold pools after having their backs hit with eucalyptus and birch leaves. The guest then wrapped themselves in sheets before sharing a buffet style dinner and toasts, Franco said, noting Sanders did not drink.
“This is why social media is such toxic horseshit,” Franco said.
While the video had not surfaced before, Sanders had already faced criticism about the Soviet trip during his 2016 presidential runs.
National conservatives, including Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., highlighted the trip and others in an attempt to portray Sanders as a communist sympathizer. Conservatives also criticized his visit while mayor when he was invited to attend the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1985, praising the rebel group opposed by the Reagan administration.
A spokesman for Sanders, Dan McLean, declined comment Thursday on the video and referred questions to Arianna Jones, senior communications adviser for Friends of Bernie Sanders, who could not be reached for comment.
In his memoir, “Outsider In the White House,” Sanders wrote of the trip to Yaroslavl: “Trust me. It was a very strange honeymoon.”
In a press conference after returning in June, Sanders spoke glowingly of the Russian people’s openness, friendliness and willingness to be self-critical. He also praised the country’s mass transit system, cultural programs and the “extraordinary debate” going on in the Soviet Union at that time about becoming a “democratic society.”
“I was personally surprised by the degree of openness and friendship they expressed for us,” Sanders said at a June 1988 press conference. The trip also came at the same time as a U.S.-Russian summit in Moscow attended by President Ronald Reagan.
According to Yahoo News, Sanders will announce another run for president soon. His campaign already appears to be springing into action on social media, Seven Days reported this week.
Ed Note — This story was updated Friday at 7 am with comments from John Franco, a city attorney who was on the trip.
