Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposed developing a student exchange program with the Soviet Union during his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vt., in the 1980s.
Sanders, who served as mayor between 1981 and 1989, floated the proposal while speaking to a group of adolescents about city government at Burlington's Lawrence Barnes School in 1987. The conversation started innocuously with Brent Sclafani, a teacher at the Barnes School, asking students to explain how they "solve problems" and conflicts.
After a student named Allison said the children attempt to resolve their issues without getting teachers involved, Sanders praised the notion and pivoted to U.S. foreign policy and the Cold War.
"What it reminds me of is not just how we have to work out differences on the board of aldermen, but really what comes to my mind is...how countries around the world have to work out problems," Sanders told the group of second-and-third-graders.
"Just this week we are going to be establishing a sister city program with a city in the Soviet Union," he said before pausing to ask if anyone knew about sister cities.
"The point of it is...to figure out a way that people can work out differences without banging themselves over the head or even worse yet without going to war and dropping nuclear bombs, right."
Video of the conversation, which was first highlighted by Politico, shows the children bellowing enthusiastically at the thought of averting nuclear war.
Sanders then expressed his sister city program would be the first step in helping people see that just because they speak a "different languages" or have different "political ideologies" it doesn't mean they "have to hate each other."
"Someday in the future, it not going to happen tomorrow...I would like to see families—your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe—go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here."
"If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what's going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot," the self-described Democratic socialist continued. "And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown."
"That's kind of what we're trying to do," Sanders added.
As mayor, Sanders rigorously pursued sister-city partnerships with both the Soviet Union and Nicaragua. At the time, the latter was mired in a bloody political revolution that saw much of the country become a battlefield.
In 1988, Burlington established a sister-city relationship with Yaroslavl, Russia, after Sanders and a handful of political and business leaders journeyed to the Soviet Union. Sanders, who was newly married, traveled to the Soviet Union with his wife in what he described in his 2015 book as a "honeymoon."
The trip came back into the media spotlight this year after video surfaced of a then-46-year-old Sanders celebrating in Yaroslavl shirtless while singing "This Land Is Your Land" with his Soviet hosts.