ONLY HER FELLOW ASSETS DENY IT:

In 1988, Ronald Reagan visited Moscow to finalize a key arms treaty as US-Russian relations continued to warm in what would be the waning days of the Cold War.

Just a couple weeks later, Bernie Sanders and nearly a dozen other Vermonters called a press conference to talk about their own recent trip to the Soviet Union -- 10 days in three cities, visits to schools and factories, and an authentic banya session, complete with vodka and patriotic singing. Sanders gushed about the Moscow Metro and the low price of theater in Yaroslavl, with which he was working to set up sister city status with Burlington, of which he was mayor. Reporters asked how much that would cost, and if anyone they met over there had thoughts about Sanders being a socialist (not realizing, perhaps, that by that time in the Soviet Union any ideological fervor was long gone). And then, just as everyone was ready to pack it in, a reporter asked, kind of quietly: "Of anybody you met, was anyone familiar with Vermont?" The reporter continued: "When you said you're from Vermont, they said, 'Oh yeah, Solzhenitsyn,' right?" [...]

By the time Sanders visited the USSR, though, Solzhenitsyn's stark accounts of the Gulag and Soviet cruelty had helped open a schism within the intellectual left about how to reconcile the brutal legacy of communism with the dream of socialist revolution. And by then, the American political visit to the Soviet Union had a long, tortured history of truth, belief, and deception. For decades, the USSR courted American dissidents -- many of whom had deep, correct criticisms of the US government's racist subjugation of black citizens -- and presented many with a false view of Soviet egalitarianism.

What were the odds that one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents was living in, of all places, Bernie Sanders's small state? The world felt bigger in the '80s, distances larger and borders harder to pierce. The country was split between those who thought the USSR posed the gravest threat to US security and values, and those who thought that was wildly overblown. Solzhenitsyn refused to be boxed in. In 1975, he gave two major speeches to the AFL-CIO denouncing communism (in Washington, he was introduced as "the single figure who has raised highest the flame of liberty"). Three years later, he gave the commencement address at Harvard -- a rousing call to the pursuit of truth but also a vicious indictment of his new home, with its ruthless capitalism and inequality, its addiction to pop culture, the flaws in its press and politicians. No one knew what to make of this man, who seemed to have harsh words for everything but God (he was deeply Russian Orthodox) and non-Soviet Russia (he was supremely nationalistic, which fueled accusations of anti-Semitism later in life, which his supporters denied).

"Truth seldom is pleasant," Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard graduates. "It is almost invariably bitter."

When Sanders returned from the Soviet Union, he talked of how impressed he was with what he felt to be people's openness to criticize their own society, but Solzhenitsyn remained blacklisted, his work banned, his exile in force. Five months after Sanders got back, the Kremlin's top ideologist said that "to publish Solzhenitsyn's work is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests."

Despite living just a couple hours away from each other, Sanders and Solzhenitsyn never met.

Following its established playbook, Russia has increasingly interfered in the politics of traditional opponents throughout the West in the hopes of undermining democracy and stability from within. Donald Trump was a political novice with a longstanding public admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and a penchant for advancing conspiracy theories. He espoused isolationist policies and had potentially compromising financial relationships with Kremlin-aligned oligarchs. He also had few apparent scruples and was running against a woman Putin considers among his main adversaries. Trump was simply an ideal candidate for the Kremlin to back. There is also reason to suspect that Russia began cultivating Trump as an asset long before his campaign for president, a common tactic the Kremlin pursues with people it suspects may be useful in the future.

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