How did the Soviet vision of global leadership transform over time? And what can it tell us about the current neo-colonial, realpolitik-like aspirations of Putin’s Russia? Join us for a talk with Sergey Radchenko, author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power – nominated for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025.
Radchenko traces the evolution of Soviet policy from Stalin’s post-war territorial ambitions, through Khrushchev’s risky overseas ventures and nuclear brinkmanship, Brezhnev’s quest for influence in the Third World, to Gorbachev’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to reinvent Moscow’s global standing. The book uncovers how perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and a relentless desire for recognition propelled Moscow’s quest for power, leaving behind consequences and legacies that continue to resonate in today’s world.
In conversation with Professor Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, they will offer a fascinating exploration of what it was like for Soviet leaders to grapple with the contest for global dominance during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unavailable Russian and Chinese sources, he analyses the psychology behind the Kremlin’s decision-making, revealing how the Soviet Union’s irreconcilable ambitions as both a superpower and the leader of global revolution shaped its tumultuous relations with the United States and China.
You can read our interview with Sergey Radchenko here.
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales.
Professor Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is a political scientist and the Director of King's Russia Institute with a research agenda focused on political economy, social psychology and public opinion, authoritarian governance and legitimation, and centre-regional relations. She recently published the award-winning book The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores issues of authoritarian legitimation in Russia after the 2014 Crimea annexation. Her most recent book is The Afterlife of the Soviet Man: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), which presents the intellectual biography of selected writers and thinkers who have contributed to knowledge-building on the effects of communism on people living under it. Professor Sharafutdinova joined King's Russia Institute in 2013. She holds a PhD from the George Washington University, and speaks Russian, Tatar and English.
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