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What would it feel like To Run the World? Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world.

What would it feel like To Run the World? The Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. In this panoramic new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow's claims to greatness. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world.

In this broad-ranging and deeply researched second book, Sergey Radchenko gracefully narrates and analyzes the end of the Cold War in Asia. Among the relationships he addresses is the Sino-Soviet normalization, which emerged in response to the difficulties both sides had with the United States; the rise and fall of the Soviet-Indian alliance, which Gorbachev envisioned as central to offsetting US alliances in the region; failed Soviet efforts to mend fences with Japan and to tap into Japanese capital to develop Siberia and the Far East; Soviet efforts to influence relations between Vietnam and Cambodia; and the USSR's decision to normalize relations with South Korea after North Korea provided resistant to political reform. Radchenko sheds new light on the actions of Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, and George H.W. Bush, among others.

One day in December 2019 I knew something was badly amiss. Russian President Vladimir Putin had called a meeting with the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States – the vague post-Soviet association of former Soviet republics that semi-defer to Russia – in order to discuss history. Not just discuss: he actually brought a thick stack of archival documents to the meeting, which, he said, demonstrated certain truths about the history of the Second World War. These had allegedly been forgotten or perhaps deliberately ignored in the West. He then selectively cited from these documents (most, if not all, of which are well-known to historians) to prove that, effectively, the West, and especially Poland, were responsible for the war.

This article reconsiders the 1945 Chongqing peace talks between the Kuo-mintang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a key turning point on the road to the Chinese civil war. The article shows that the talks represented a lost opportunity to avert the slide into fratricidal warfare. The CCP leader, Mao Zedong, under pressure from Iosif Stalin, was prepared to compromise with his rival Chiang Kai-shek on the basis of dividing China into two separately administered territories (roughly, north and south). Chiang was unwilling to consider such a step, which from his perspective was unpatriotic. His resistance to the division of China doomed the talks and precipitated the outbreak of war.