evidence: This little exchange hasn’t made it into most of the stories about the Sanders’ Soviet adventure. The media usually treats the trip as a comedic piece of trivia that accentuates just how outside the mainstream Sanders has always been — the honeymooners take Yaroslavl! — rather than part of a complicated tradition of lefties visiting the USSR and what they chose to pay attention to and what they chose to ignore. [...] 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. [...] 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."