On Red-Baiting, Then and Now

On 5 March 2020, the New York Times published a front-page exposé detailing the efforts of Bernie Sanders—then mayor of Burlington, Vermont—to establish a sister-city relationship with the Soviet city of Iaroslavl´ in 1987–88. The article opens with a quotation from a letter Sanders wrote to his Soviet counterpart articulating a desire for the United States and the Soviet Union to live together in peace. The next sentences—and much of the subsequent article—paint Sanders as a naïf, perhaps even a dupe with suspect political leanings. "Unbeknownst to him," the Times writes, the Soviets were in fact seeking "to exploit Mr. Sanders's anti-war agenda for their own propaganda purposes."¹ While the story of Sanders's trip to the USSR in 1988 is well known, the New York Times article's claim to novelty and significance rests on its presentation and interpretation of some 89 pages of new archival materials from Iaroslavl´ consisting of "letters, telegrams, and internal Soviet government documents."² Many historians will recognize the language here of the (heroic) "quest" into the hidden depths of the archives.³ Indeed, the article details the process of extracting these files (which actually proceeded with remarkable speed and ease) and leaves open the tantalizing possibility of further revelations: "Six pages were hidden from view because, the archivists said, they contained personal information."⁴

In an ironic twist to this story, the US ambassador during this period, Jack F. Matlock, Jr., immediately wrote a letter to the editor that was highly critical of this take on the 1980s. Getting straight to the point in his opening sentence, Matlock directly called the article "a distortion of history." Not only was the sister-city program actively encouraged by the US government, but it helped facilitate the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and the opening of Soviet society. Indeed, the nefarious "propaganda" efforts decried in the New York Times piece, Matlock noted, were in fact directed toward dismantling suspicion of the United States.⁵ Far from being a dupe or a leftist firebrand, it seems, Sanders was actually supporting the official policies of President Ronald Reagan. A second critical letter, from the historian Barbara Keys, focused on this point and closed with a rhetorical question: "Will you next publish an article about how President Reagan was the tool of a Soviet propaganda effort?"⁶ A number of other commentators also jumped into the fray, most significantly Masha Gessen in the New Yorker. In an essay that cites the historian David Brandenberger, she likewise highlights the flaws in this presentation of supposed "revelations" from the archive and explains the particular meanings of the Soviet concept of "propaganda."⁷ In still another ironic twist, however, some observers responded to the fracas by stoking concerns about contemporary Russian "propaganda": a former State Department official and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) under Barack Obama, Dan Baer, thus commented on Twitter: "Jack Matlock has—sadly—been a mouthpiece for positions held by Russian state media for years."⁸

On the one hand, it seems likely that the concern with prominent Americans appearing a little too friendly with Russians stems from the intense attention surrounding US President Donald Trump's Russian connections and his apparent personal sympathies for Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the other hand, the New York Times has also devoted attention to the same issue in reverse: the question of Russians who, in the paper's telling at least, seem to be working hard to have cozy relations with American cultural and academic institutions. In October 2019, the paper ran a piece drawing attention to the role of Russian oligarchs in funding US-based museum exhibits and artistic productions celebrating Russian culture. The clear message was that supporting culture is fine, but this sort of cultural support is fishy because a number of these wealthy Russians and their businesses figure on the current sanctions list, and they are close to the Kremlin, which aims to use "the 'soft power' of cultural diplomacy as a tool of foreign policy."⁹ Another article...