The Vermont senator has mounted an unexpectedly fierce challenge from the left to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary by calling for government health care, free college education, dismantlement of big banks and higher taxes on the rich.
Along the way, Mr. Sanders’s opponents have used his 1988 trip to Yaroslavl against him. Former Republican candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) quipped last fall that Mr. Sanders “went to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon, and I don’t think he ever came back.”
But the trip cemented an enduring partnership between the two cities, a link that later brought hundreds of Yaroslavl residents to Burlington and vice versa. It also gave rise in Yaroslavl to a small but ardent Russian outpost of enthusiastic Bernie Sanders fans—including Dr. Novikov, who recalled flying to Burlington a few months after hosting Mr. Sanders.
Mr. Sanders toured his three-person Soviet delegation around Burlington personally day and night, Dr. Novikov said, on a visit that included a meeting with Vermont’s Grateful Dead-inspired ice-cream entrepreneurs.
“How do you say it correctly, Tom & Jerry’s? No, right, Ben & Jerry’s,” Dr. Novikov said. “They were these two young men, and Sanders was an influential person, so they welcomed us personally and showed us everything.”
Mr. Sanders’s 1988 trip came as Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies opened up the Soviet Union to the rest of the world, prompting a wave of visits by foreigners of all political stripes and a surge in U.S.-Soviet sister-city pacts. Yaroslavl, a 600,000-person city with well-preserved churches and czarist-era buildings, buzzed with cultural activity and interest in the U.S.
“Our city, which was a very interesting bride, received various proposals from a number of American cities as suitors, including one from Milwaukee, but it didn’t work out with Milwaukee,” 58-year-old IT specialist Pavel Romanovsky said. “It turned out they were ‘bad boys.’ Sanders turned out to be a nice guy.”
Mr. Sanders had crafted what he called a foreign policy for the city of Burlington and made various trips abroad, including to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union.
In Yaroslavl, his delegation met local officials in between cruising the Volga and touring the churches and riverfront.
For the final evening, the translator announced the group would attend a farewell banquet at the “health resort of the oil refinery,” recalled Burlington lawyer Howard Seaver, who went on to lead the sister-city society. There, after a traditional birch-leaf beating in the Russian sauna, they sat around a huge Soviet-style rectangle table facing one another and learned “what several vodka toasts in a row can do to you,” Mr. Seaver joked.
“Trust me,” Mr. Sanders wrote in his 1997 book. “It was a very strange honeymoon.”
Jane O’Meara Sanders, the Vermont senator’s wife, said in an interview Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, ahead of Monday’s caucuses in the state, that she and her husband knew they had little time to take off, and so scheduled their wedding right before their already-planned departure for the Soviet Union.
“Because we’re both workaholics, we said, ‘OK, we’re not going to be able to have any time off after we get married. Why don’t we just do it now?’ ” she said. The couple have both expressed pride that the relationship with Yaroslavl has endured as a model of citizen diplomacy.
“It gave us all an upfront, close view of a communist state and all its flaws and shortcomings,” said Peter Clavelle, who attended the trip as a member of the Burlington administration and later became mayor himself. “But I think what probably struck him, and all of us, is that people are people—warm, friendly and hospitable people who didn’t have a whole lot but gave what they had.”
Mr. Sanders, speaking in a joint radio interview during the trip with Yaroslavl’s then-mayor, observed that health care and housing were superior in the U.S., but far more expensive. Both mayors agreed that the arms race was detracting from necessary social spending at home.
Soon, the sister-city ties blossomed. Musicians, nurses, doctors, firefighters, athletes, teachers, businesspeople, journalists and students all participated in exchanges between Burlington and Yaroslavl. A few got married. The Yaroslavl Tornadoes drubbed some Vermonters on the hockey rink. One Burlingtonian opened a Yaroslavl pizza shop.
The exchange had moments of levity. Mr. Clavelle recalled how the pizza shop owner once asked him to bring over bags of oregano, but he declined, fearing Russian customs would mistake the spice for another herb more often associated with Vermont.
Many of the exchanges continue today, despite difficulties owing to the poor relations between Washington and Moscow.
Yaroslavl has a population about 14 times the size of Burlington’s, but past exchange participants insist on similarities. Both cities have a progressive streak: In 2012, Yaroslavl elected one of Russia’s only anti-Kremlin opposition mayors, now on trial for bribery charges he calls politically motivated.
The cities are also similarly chilly.
“They’re both cold but with warm hearts,” says Irina Novikova, president of Yaroslavl’s Russian-American Friendship Society, which has been breathing new life into the relationship with Burlington in recent years.
Ms. Novikova said she contemplated sending an official letter of support from the society for Mr. Sanders but worried a ringing endorsement from Russians would hurt his chances among American voters in today’s tense geopolitical climate.
More than his politics, Mr. Sanders’s personal attention seems to have won him fans in Yaroslavl.
In 2013, Mr. Sanders welcomed a delegation from the Russian city to Vermont. There, he met Vladimir Khryashchev, the 37-year-old CEO of a Yaroslavl analytics startup. The senator asked him: “Can the average Russian family afford to buy a home computer now, in 2013?”
Mr. Khryashchev says his social circle in Yaroslavl largely comprehends U.S. politics through “House of Cards,” the Netflix series that airs on Russian state television. Mr. Sanders’s rise, he says, confounds their expectations that American politicians need corporate backers or family fortunes to win the White House.
“People don’t even think it’s possible,” he said.
Perhaps no Yaroslavl resident knows Burlington better than Valery Volovenko, a Professor of Physiology at Yaroslavl’s medical school, who visited Vermont 14 times running exchanges of doctors and nurses.
Dr. Volovenko happened to be in town when Mr. Sanders won election to the House of Representatives in 1990 and attended the victory party alongside a delegation of Yaroslavl journalists.
The bow-tied Russian doctor recalled the excitement. The results came in live. People were waving “BERNIE” signs. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was served in abundance.
Dr. Volovenko is hoping for a repeat Bernie Sanders fête. “In him you feel this concern for people, for the population, for the future of the country,” the 75-year-old doctor said. “If he’s successful, maybe we can join him at the inauguration!”
—Peter Nicholas in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this article.
Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com
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