Sergey S. Radchenko (Russian:Сергей Сергеевич Радченко; born 1980) is a Soviet-born British historian.^[1] He is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs,Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and visiting professor atCardiff University.^[2][3] He was previously Reader atAberystwyth University, Lecturer atUniversity of Nottingham Ningbo China, a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at theWoodrow Wilson Centre, and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor atEast China Normal University (Shanghai).^[4]

He is a historian of the Cold War, mainly known for his work onSino-Soviet relations and Soviet foreign policy.^[5][6][7] He also works on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies, and is a frequent contributor toForeign Affairs,The New York Times,The Spectator and other outlets.

Radchenko was born inPrimorsky Krai in 1980 and, for the first fifteen years of his life, lived inKorsakov,Sakhalin Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR. In 1995 Radchenko left Sakhalin for the United States as an exchange student in the US government-funded FLEX/FSA program. He graduated fromMarshall High School in Marshall, TX, in 1995.

Radchenko then pursued his studies in East Texas, later in Hong Kong, and finally in the UK.^[8] He attended theLondon School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London, earning aBSc in International Relations in 2001 and a PhD in International History in 2005. His PhD thesis, completed under the supervision ofOdd Arne Westad, focused on Sino-Soviet relations. It was later published in a revised form asTwo Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-67 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2008).

In later years, Radchenko worked as a faculty member at theNational University of Mongolia (2003–05), Assistant Professor atPittsburg State University (2005–07), fellow at theLondon School of Economics (2007–09), Lecturer at theUniversity of Nottingham Ningbo China (2009–13), Reader atAberystwyth University (2013–16), and Professor atCardiff University (2016–21) before he moved toJohns Hopkins SAIS in 2021.

His work focuses on Soviet and Russian history and Sino-Russian relations, and emphasizes the importance of legitimacy and recognition in foreign policy. This thesis is presented in detail in his bookTo Run the World: the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Languages: English, Russian, Italian, Chinese (Mandarin), and Mongolian.^[9]

• 2025:Lionel Gelber Prize forTo Run the World^[10]
• 2025: Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Prize forTo Run the World.
• 2026: Bronze Medal, Arthur Ross Book Award forTo Run the World.

• Radchenko, Sergey.Two suns in the heavens: the Sino-Soviet struggle for supremacy, 1962-1967. Vol. 33. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009.ISBN 978-0-8047-5879-6
• Craig, Campbell, and Sergey S. Radchenko.The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War. Yale University Press, 2008.ISBN 978-0-300-11028-9
• Kalinovsky, Artemy, and Sergey Radchenko, eds.The end of the Cold War and the Third World: new perspectives on regional conflict. Taylor & Francis, 2011.ISBN 978-0-415-60054-5
• Radchenko, Sergey.Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War. Oxford University Press, 2014.ISBN 978-0-19-993877-3
• To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power. Cambridge University Press, 2024.ISBN 978-1-10-847735-2

• Brennen, Jensen (Spring 2024)."Back in the U.S.S.R."Johns Hopkins Magazine.

• 1980 births
• Living people
• Johns Hopkins University faculty
• 21st-century American historians
• British international relations scholars
• Historians of warfare
• Cold War historians
• Academics of Aberystwyth University

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles containing Russian-language text