On Thursday night, the Times published an article titled “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity.” The subtitle: “Previously unseen documents from a Soviet archive show how hard Mr. Sanders worked to find a sister city in Russia when he was a mayor in the 1980s. Moscow saw a chance for propaganda.” (Seven paragraphs in, the paper clarifies that the documents, publicly available from a regional archive in Russia, were “previously unseen” insofar as no one had previously requested to look at them.)

The language of the headline and the subhead promise disquieting news. In fact, the story that unfolds is innocuous and familiar. In 1988, Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, worked to forge a sister-city relationship with Yaroslavl, a historic Russian city a few hours northeast of Moscow. In doing so, according to the Times, Sanders unwittingly played into the hands of Soviet authorities, who exploited his “antiwar agenda for their own propaganda purposes.” The reporter, Anton Troianovski, described the search for the documents, which involved taking a train, visiting the archive, and physically paging through catalogues until he found a reference to the Burlington files. (Alternatively, he could have logged on to the Web site of Yaroslavl’s regional archives and tried typing “Берлингтон”—“Burlington”—or “дружественный”—“friendly”—into the search field, and he would have located the call numbers for the folder containing the documents from 1988.)

The exhibits include Jane and Bernie Sanders’s hotel-registration card; a letter and a telegram from Sanders, in English, affirming his enthusiasm for the visit and the sister-city relationship; a page-long, seven-point agenda for the October, 1988, reciprocal visit of Yaroslavl city officials to Burlington; and a page of standard instructions for Soviet functionaries speaking to foreigners, reminding them to use every opportunity to reiterate the Soviets’ desires for peace and for the success of nuclear negotiations, then underway in Geneva.

These are very boring documents. If anything is noteworthy, it is the last point of the proposed agenda: “At any time during the visit, members of the delegation [on the Soviet side] are prepared to answer any questions about Soviet domestic and foreign policies.” This was indeed the spirit of the time: the Soviet Union was opening up. President Ronald Reagan visited Moscow around the same time that the Sanderses travelled to Yaroslavl. But the Times casts the agenda and the instructions as somehow sinister. The agenda is titled “A Plan for Informational and Propaganda Work”—but in Soviet political language, “propaganda” described any effort to promote a point of view. The article contains no quotes from historians or Sovietologists who might have placed the documents and visit in context. One such historian, David Brandenberger, a professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, posted on Facebook, “Anyone who knows anything about research in the former Soviet archives would recognize the official reception of Sanders in Yaroslavl in 1988 and subsequent contacts as routine and pure officialese. To call this ‘propaganda’ is an insult to Cold War propagandists.”

Brandenberger, who has written two books on Soviet propaganda, explained to me, over Facebook Messenger, that “propaganda differs from persuasion and other forms of communication in the sense that it publicly promotes a pre-prepared, legible, monological position on a particular issue.” He wrote, “Propagandists do not engage in spontaneous dialogue or a conversational exchange—they advance an articulate, well-planned official line in a relentless, uncompromising way. In the case of these 1988 documents, the routine recommendation that some middling party boss talk up the cause of world peace and disarmament with Sanders doesn’t equal propaganda.”

President Ronald Reagan visited Mikhail Gorbachev, in Moscow, in 1988, a time when the Soviet Union was opening up. Photograph from Shutterstock

A more accurate way to describe the documents, Brandenberger said, would be to call them “a recommendation about how to engage Sanders on a topic of mutual interest.” He continued, “I’ve not seen the entire document, but the pages reproduced in the Times describe the U.S.S.R.’s official position on disarmament and then recommend talking points to bring up in engagements with foreigners like Sanders. The document refers to this activity as ‘propaganda,’ but the actions described are a lot closer to relationship-building and cooperation than some sort of dogmatic messaging.”

The late nineteen-eighties were a time of relationship-building. Quoting the Sanders campaign, the Times story notes that dozens of American cities forged relationships with Soviet cities, with the encouragement of President Reagan. A few months before Sanders travelled to Yaroslavl, I got to glimpse one such relationship, when my English teacher from the Soviet Union came to the United States. His name was David Bell, and he was born in 1921, in Texas, where his Ukrainian parents had fled to escape pogroms. When he was ten, his father moved the family to the Soviet Union. Bell’s parents, later deemed untrustworthy by Soviet authorities, perished in internal exile. Bell worked as an English teacher in Dubna, a small town about eighty miles north of Moscow. When I was twelve, my grandmother, who lived in Dubna, arranged for me to take private lessons with Bell. I studied with him for two summers. He played Elvis Presley and Pete Seeger for me, to help me learn American English, which I would have had no other opportunity to hear. I don’t know how he got the tapes, because he was not allowed to return to America until late 1987. By then I was twenty and living in the U.S. I picked Bell up at the airport, and he immediately told me that he was going to travel to La Crosse, Wisconsin: he had been corresponding with some anti-nuclear activists there, and there was talk of creating a La Crosse–Dubna sister-city relationship. The next nineteen years of Bell’s life, until his death in 2006, were devoted to organizing visits, concerts, talks, and whatever else went into the sister-city relationship.

At the end of 1988, thirty U.S. high schools (in nineteen states, of which Vermont was not one) and an equal number of Soviet high schools announced the beginning of the first Soviet-American exchange program. Any number of efforts in what was known as citizen diplomacy—a term coined earlier in the decade—sprouted at the same time. This was politics as politics ought to be: people in conversation, engaged in learning about one another, with the express purpose of forging better ways of living together on the planet. For the Times to frame those efforts as propaganda is, arguably, to engage in propaganda, and to devalue the human essence of politics.

Regarding his 1988 visit to Yaroslavl, Sanders made some observant remarks, as when he noted how self-critical his Soviet interlocutors had been, and some ill-advised remarks, as when he said that he “didn’t notice much deprivation.” The Times story quotes only the latter category of remarks. But, as I wrote in February, at the time Sanders was the mayor of a small American city; he was representing himself and his local constituents, who were not wronged by his naïveté. Now he is a viable contender for the Democratic nomination, and the Times, by misrepresenting the context and the impact of his long-ago actions, risks more harm to American politics than Sanders’s credulousness ever could.