Dr. Severyan Dyakonov is a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. His current project explores how the Soviet Union promoted socialist modernity in the decolonized world during the Cold War. He defended his Ph.D. thesis “Soviet Public Diplomacy in India, 1959-1965” at the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2022. Before coming to NYU, he was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship). His current project deals with Cold War dynamics in neutral spaces of International Organizations, more specifically how the Eastern Bloc pushed for Socialist ideals through the International Red Cross movement. This project tackles Moscow’s influence on newly created societies of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in decolonized Africa and Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s.