I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and 1994.

Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring...