To Run the World by Sergey Radchenko. Cambridge University Press, 2024, 760 pp.
The Cold War story is commonly defined by national-level ideological and zero-sum competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in literature that is led by historians like John Lewis Gaddis and Odd Arne Westad. Their theses, and much of the research into the Cold War in the last 25 years, relies on this foundation of incompatible ideological friction. Sergey Radchenko, a leading cold war historian, wrote To Run the World as a Cold War history book that integrates nontraditional sources, such as Chinese archives, and brings an alternative thesis to the research.
Radchenko’s core thesis is the Cold War, at its foundation, was not an ideological driven conflict, but a conflict driven by the leadership of the Soviet Union—seeking legitimacy as an equal to the United States and solidifying its role as the sole leader in the Socialist Camp. Nikita Khrushchev is one of the earliest, and strongest, examples that demonstrate the desire for legitimacy over ideological conflict. Radchenko explained that around the same time the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb, Khrushchev’s mindset also changed from “capitalists will die” to “we’ll all die.” This shift emphasized an early departure from the ideology that he perceived himself—and the Soviet Union—as equal to the United States. The book further details Khrushchev’s proclamations that peaceful coexistence, which he argued in a 1955 report would make war avoidable. Mutually assured destruction had cemented a level of legitimacy that the United States had to recognize.
Khrushchev, and later Leonid Brezhnev, are also described as being in a secondary type of internal Cold War with Mao Zedong—more explicitly in the Third World where each country’s competing variation of socialism was on display. Radchenko discusses this internal fight throughout the book, beginning by breaking down the ideological-based arguments about the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. This fight becomes the most evident in Chapter 12, which demonstrates a battle for leadership and influence in the Third World equal to the Soviet Union’s battle against the United States.
Each Soviet leader, from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, is detailed through multiple chapters covering key periods within each reign, bringing legitimacy to their actions. Stalin sought legitimacy through his efforts to have the Soviet’s territorial gains explicitly recognized by the United States and its allies, but was thwarted multiple times, especially in Germany. Khrushchev sought it through the H-bomb and by attempting to sideline China to preserve the Soviet’s lead role among the revolutionary communist nations. Brezhnev sought to build legitimacy in the Socialist Camp and the Third World through his support for Ho Chi Minh. This breakdown from Radchenko highlights the book’s second strength—sourcing.
Radchenko states Cold War history often relies on secondary sources. For comparison, The Global Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2011) by Odd Arne Westad leans on secondary sources like publicly available speeches and news articles, while incorporating some primary sources without using archives. John Gaddis’ The Cold War (Penguin Books, 2006) takes a different approach and uses available Post-Soviet Eastern European, Chinese, and Western archives available in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sergey Radchenko’s To Run the World brings in previously unavailable and difficult to access Russian archives as well as Chinese archives that have since been closed off to researchers. Instead of reliance on secondary sources, the archival sourcing brings relevant historical evidence to support his thesis. However, this also leads into one of this book’s limitations—it does not discuss archival bias and suppression.
While national archives are treasure troves of evidence for historians, the availability of documents can be carefully curated to ensure they share a toned-down version of history. Additionally, future access can be curtailed if the archive owners find the use of their documents inappropriate, creating the potential for bias. To Run the World could be interpreted as having a positive-leaning view of some leaders, such as Khrushchev, that could be a result of archival suppression.
Another limitation is the focus on legitimacy as an equal global superpower to the United States. While this is an alternative view of the Cold War story, it misses the elite domestic politics driving the need to build legitimacy. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization effort is the biggest domestic event mentioned in this regard, which would support his claim to power and ability to lead the Soviet Union into the future. His downfall and the ensuing power struggle are briefly mentioned, but there could have been more links between domestic legitimacy and the desire to be seen as an equal with the United States to bolster the thesis. Despite its limitation, the presentation of the thesis and the history are sound. In his conclusion, Sergey Radchenko links the desire for recognition and legitimacy in the Soviet era to Putin’s actions and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, making a clear connection between past and present.
The book is well worth reading for any historian, strategist, analyst, or curious mind precisely because of the reliability of its sourcing. The book’s unique and thorough perspective, which includes all levels of government, force the reader to consider the non-ideological reasoning behind Cold War events.
Alex Schiller