Event Details

End: May 2, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Natalia Telepneva and commentators Daniela Richterova and Sergey Radchenko. Register here. 

Cold War Liberation traces the story of Soviet support for African revolutionaries who led armed struggles in three Portuguese colonies—Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. While conventional wisdom says that Moscow had lost interest in Africa by mid-1960s, Telepneva argues that the Soviets redirected their attention to forging close links with the military and security services of their African clients. Telepneva also details how Soviet middle-ranking bureaucrats often shaped policy in Africa, including during the early stages of the Angolan Civil War, 1974-1975.

Natalia Telepneva is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is the author of Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975. She has also published on Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence for the International History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies and has co-edited the Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World (2018). Natalia is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics (2015) and was the recipient of the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2017-2020. 

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009) and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales.

Daniela Richterova is Senior Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research and teaching focuses on Cold War intelligence history as well as contemporary issues related to intelligence liaison, counterterrorism intelligence, and intelligence analysis. Dr Richterova has presented her work at Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Cambridge, and the SGI – the British Study Group in Intelligence.