The Clinton Campaign Is Screwed

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89. Wrong!

We wanted to see if Sanders actually honeymooned on the turf of the United States’ former adversary during the final years of the Cold War.

Sister cities

The trip took place while Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., from 1981 to 1989. Toward the end of his mayoral tenure, the small city on Lake Champlain launched a sister-city program with Yaroslavl, located 160 miles northeast of Moscow.

The program, which is still operating today, has facilitated exchanges between the two cities involving "mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians and the (Yaroslavl) ice-hockey team," according to its website.

Along with sister-city relationships with Bethlehem in the West Bank and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the Yaroslavl program was part of Sanders’ unorthodox attempt to take on international issues from a small city in New England. Sanders also actively pursued his agenda outside of the country, writing letters to world leaders and even traveling to Cuba to meet with the mayor of Havana.

"Burlington had a foreign policy," he wrote in his 1997 book Outsider in the House, "because, as progressives, we understood that we all live in one world."

The bond between Burlington and Yaroslavl solidified when Sanders and his wife, as members of a 12-person delegation from Burlington, paid their Soviet counterparts a visit in 1988.

The timing of the trip was unusual. Bernie and Jane were married May 28, 1988. The delegation left Burlington the next day.

"Trust me," Sanders writes in the book. "It was a very strange honeymoon."

When reached for comment, Sanders’ campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple "set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off."