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Jeremy S. Friedman

Jeremy S. Friedman

Associate Professor of Business Administration

Associate Professor of Business Administration

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Jeremy Friedman is an assistant professor of business administration in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit, and teaches the course of the same name in the MBA required curriculum. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.

Professor Friedman studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution in Russia, China, and the developing world. He examines how the project of socialist revolution and leftist thought more broadly evolved over the course of the twentieth century, particularly as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization. His work has been published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies and in media outlets including The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times. His first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, was published in 2015.

Professor Friedman received his PhD in history from Princeton University and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in international security studies at Yale University, where he taught courses in Russian and Cold War history.

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Business, Government and the International Economy
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Jeremy S. Friedman
Unit
Business, Government and the International Economy
Contact Information
(617) 495-6921
Send Email
Featured Work Publications Research Summary
Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World
The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. 

Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.

Jeremy Friedman is an assistant professor of business administration in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit, and teaches the course of the same name in the MBA required curriculum. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.

Professor Friedman studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution in Russia, China, and the developing world. He examines how the project of socialist revolution and leftist thought more broadly evolved over the course of the twentieth century, particularly as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization. His work has been published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies and in media outlets including The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times. His first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, was published in 2015.

Professor Friedman received his PhD in history from Princeton University and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in international security studies at Yale University, where he taught courses in Russian and Cold War history.

Featured Work
Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World
The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. 

Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.
Books
  • Friedman, Jeremy. Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. View Details
Journal Articles
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Ambiguity of Stalin." Modern Age 61, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 61–66. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Who is a Better Ally for the United States: China or Russia?" PostEverything: Perspective. Washington Post (April 7, 2017). View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy, and Peter Rutland. "Anti-imperialism: The Leninist Legacy and the Fate of World Revolution." Special Issue on 1917–2017, The Russian Revolution a Hundred Years Later. Slavic Review 76, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 591–599. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Revolutionary Roots of Russian Foreign Policy." Current History 116, no. 792 (October 2017): 258–263. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Enemy of My Enemy: The Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party's Support for Ayatollah Khomeini." Journal of Cold War Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 3–37. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Where Is China Headed?" Orbis 60, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 453–459. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Soviet Policy in the Developing World and the Chinese Challenge in the 1960s." Cold War History 10, no. 2 (2010): 247–272. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Free at Last, Now What: The Soviet and Chinese Attempts to Offer a Roadmap for the Post-Colonial World." Modern China Studies [Dang dai Zhongguo yan jiu] 22, no. 1 (2015): 259–292. View Details
Book Chapters
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Soviet Policy in the Developing World and the Chinese Challenge in the 1960s." In Fragile Alliance: The Cold War and Sino-Soviet Relations, edited by Shen Zhihua and Douglas Stiffler. Beijing, China: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2010. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
  • Friedman, Jeremy, and Sophus A. Reinert. "Angola Starts Now." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 719-058, February 2019. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Socialism." Harvard Business School Background Note 721-030, December 2020. View Details
  • Cavallo, Alberto, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons, and Matthew Weinzierl. "The BGIE Twenty (2021 version)." Harvard Business School Technical Note 718-032, December 2017. (Revised December 2020.) View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy, and Sophus A. Reinert. "Angola Starts Now." Harvard Business School Case 719-007, January 2019. (Revised December 2020.) View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Last Hegemon? US-China Relations and the Future of World Order." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 719-015, January 2019. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Iran on the Brink: The Nuclear Deal and the Future of the Islamic Republic." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 719-016, January 2019. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Hegemony." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-014, October 2018. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Empire vs. Nation-State." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-013, October 2018. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Last Hegemon? US-China Relations and the Future of World Order." Harvard Business School Case 718-059, March 2018. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Iran on the Brink: The Nuclear Deal and the Future of the Islamic Republic." Harvard Business School Case 717-038, March 2017. (Revised November 2017.) View Details
Presentations
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Constructing Socialism in the Third World: The Case of Tanzania." Yale University, New Haven, CT, November 29, 2016. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World." National History Center, Washington, DC, December 5, 2016. View Details
Other Publications and Materials
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Who is a Better Ally for the United States: China or Russia?" PostEverything: Perspective. Washington Post (April 7, 2017). View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The Nuclear Deal Could Transform Iran's Revolution." National Interest (May 6, 2015). View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "The West Should Not Boycott Russia's Victory Day." The Diplomat (May 5, 2015). View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Is the West's Problem with Putin, or Russia?" Moscow Times (November 14, 2014). View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy, and Sergey Radchencko. "Parade Observer: In Competing with United States to Be the Regional Spokesman, China Has Not Forgotten Anti-imperialist and Anti-hegemonic Slogans." Pengpai [The Paper] (September 2, 2015). View Details
Research Summary
Overview
Professor Friedman devotes his research to the history of the Left and its struggle to end economic and social inequality. He studies how this struggle evolved, its various cultural contexts, and what paths have been tried and rejected. He has been able to gain access to archival resources, some no longer available to researchers, and to study them in their original languages.

In his first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, Professor Friedman examines the different approaches taken by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in their quest for influence in newly decolonized Third World states after World War II. He is currently investigating how socialism played itself out in the political trajectories of five of these countries—Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile, Angola, and Iran—from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He explores the process by which actors in these countries, as well as in the Soviet Union and China, attempted to create a workable model of socialism for the developing world. In this environment, no one knew what “Third World Socialism” should look like, so the lessons of each attempt to build it were studied and absorbed into the next one.
Additional Information
  • CV Friedman 2019
In The News

In The News

    • 18 Dec 2015
    • PBS Newshour

    Trucks stop, but Putin rolls on

    • 14 Dec 2015
    • Bloomberg

    Best Books of 2015

    • 23 Nov 2015
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    The Historian Who Came in from the Cold

    • 21 Nov 2015
    • Guardian

    Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman review – rethinking history

Additional Information
CV Friedman 2019

In The News

    • 18 Dec 2015
    • PBS Newshour

    Trucks stop, but Putin rolls on

    • 14 Dec 2015
    • Bloomberg

    Best Books of 2015

    • 23 Nov 2015
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    The Historian Who Came in from the Cold

    • 21 Nov 2015
    • Guardian

    Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman review – rethinking history

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