Ivan Krivushin

This book explores the relationship between Russia and South Africa from 1918 to 2025 as a window into the transformation of the global order. It examines how two very different societies interacted across four successive eras: the revolutionary age, the Cold War, the post-Cold War unipolar moment, and the emerging multipolar world. The chapters trace the influence of the Russian Revolution in South Africa, Soviet support for the anti-apartheid movement, the role of Southern Africa in Cold War diplomacy, and the impact of democratic transition in the Soviet Union and of its collapse. The book then analyses contemporary relations through the lenses of BRICS, foreign policy, security cooperation, domestic politics, trade, investment, and responses to the war in Ukraine. Moving beyond traditional bilateral history, it shows how ideas, identities, and competing visions of world order have shaped relations between the two countries and their place in international politics.

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of the evolution of Russia's relations with the Global South across political, military-political, and economic domains. Though formally part of the Global North, Russia has, since 2007, increasingly positioned itself as an independent--and often opposing--actor to the West, aligning more closely with the Global South. This volume explores Russia's foreign policy during the 2022-2024 war with Ukraine and confrontation with the West, analyzing it at both global and regional levels. The contributors propose models for understanding the Kremlin's shifting strategies, including doctrinal orientations, redefinitions of national interest, and the role of personal leadership. The book also examines the tools of Russian foreign policy in the evolving geopolitical context. It highlights key areas such as Russia's efforts to reshape BRICS as a geo-economic counterweight to the West, its renewed activism in Sub-Saharan Africa, complex Middle Eastern diplomacy, and its strategic turn to Latin America--all within the broader pivot to the Global South. Placed in long-term historical context--from the medieval era to the 2000s--the book combines theoretical and applied analysis. It is written for a multidisciplinary audience and is suitable for academic and classroom use.

The book aims to trace and explain the historical evolution of Moscow, the capital of the Tsardom of Russia, Soviet Union and Russian Federation, as a political entity and political community, and to understand what place Moscow occupied within the Russian political space and what role it played in Russian political life for centuries until 2018. The authors consistently examine the dramatic political history of the contemporary Russian capital in the Moscow (13th – 17th centuries) and St. Petersburg (18th – 19th centuries) epochs, in the Soviet period, in the post-Soviet era, and identify its key points and the most pivotal events.