Professor Sergey Radchenko Wins Gelber Prize

On April 9, 2025, Janice Stein, director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School, awarded Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, with the Lionel Gelber Prize. This award, which honors the world’s best work on foreign policy, recognized Prof. Radchenko’s 2024 book To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.

Stein hailed his work as a newly minted classic that “will endure,” a reinterpretation of the Cold War rooted in history but whose insights span political science, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, that left the prize jury “blown away.” To Run the World wades into the fraught debate over whether the Cold War was driven more by ideology (the clash between capitalist democracy and communist dictatorship) or by national interest (the cold-blooded calculations of realpolitik) and suggests a third, overlooked option: recognition.

Radchenko shines a spotlight on how Moscow and Beijing, and great powers and their leaders more broadly, crave respect and legitimacy from allies and rivals alike. In examining thousands of declassified Soviet archival documents, Radchenko found overwhelming evidence of Kremlin leaders’ desire for recognition: by China of the Soviets’ preeminent status within global communism, and by America of their status as co-superpowers who would “run the world together.” Radchenko’s archival work also reveals disquieting wrinkles to the Cold War narrative—such as Leonid Brezhnev’s racist disdain for his Chinese comrades while trying to bond with Richard Nixon as fellow “Europeans.”

To Run the World reframes the Cold War history we thought we knew, and contains key insights for today, in a new era when China seeks recognition as a peer superpower, and when Russian resentment and rage has dragged Europe back into war.

You can watch the 2025 Lionel Gelber Prize ceremony and lecture here.