This week, Meduza spoke to Dr. Sergey Radchenko about his next book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024), which explores the era’s diplomatic history, focusing on how narratives of legitimacy offer crucial insights for interpreting Moscow’s motivations and foreign policy.

The conversation covers telling anecdotes about prominent world leaders like Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev, their psychology, and how individual quirks shaped world events. Dr. Radchenko explains how resentment and the need for legitimacy and recognition drove Soviet decision-making in ways that past literature about communist ideology and imperialism fails to capture.

Timestamps for this episode:

06:22 The Role of recognition and legitimacy in Soviet foreign policy
08:56 Raskolnikov on the global stage
12:24 The strange pursuit of greatness and global leadership
14:52 Soviet ambitions and Soviet means
17:02 Moscow's persistent resentment
21:34 The Berlin Crisis
28:30 The paradox of the USSR as a great power
31:08 China's role in Soviet self-perceptions
34:13 Autocrats and peace promotion

New episodes of The Naked Pravda are released at the end of every week. Catch each show by subscribing through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or one of these other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the podcast, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Production and mixing by Ania Kovalenko. Sound editing by Kevin Rothrock. A.I. voice-dubbing of the Kavkazskaya Plennitsa scene by Eleven Labs.

How the USSR tried to run the world