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About
Balint is a PhD candidate in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with expertise on European and East Asian international history during the interwar period. He studied for his undergraduate degree at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest and the University of Bristol, and holds an MSc in Theory and History of International Relations from the LSE.
Balint’s research examines Soviet and British foreign policy in the interwar period, with a particular focus on the ideological and geopolitical confrontation between Britain and the Soviet Union during the 1920s. His thesis explores how this antagonism reached its sharpest expression in the struggle over the Chinese Revolution, and what this episode reveals about the wider Soviet challenge to empire across Asia. Drawing on archival sources from Britain, Russia, and China, his work explores how competing visions of modernity, the legacies of imperial rivalry, and the mobilisation of colonial anti-imperialist movements intersected to shape both the politics of revolutionary China and the precarious international landscape of the interwar years. By examining the Chinese Revolution within the context of Anglo-Soviet relations, the project aims to demonstrate that the defining struggle of the 1920s was not primarily over the postwar settlement of Europe but lay in the colonial world, over the future of empire and world revolution, a struggle that anticipated the dynamics of the later Cold War in Asia.
In addition to his doctoral project, Balint is currently working on a journal article that examines Britain’s role in Soviet-Hungarian relations during the 1920s, focusing in particular on the failed attempts to establish diplomatic and economic ties between Hungary and the Soviet Union.
Provisional thesis title: 'Britain, Revolutionary China and the Soviet Struggle for World Revolution in the East, 1923-1927'
Supervisor: Professor Vladislav Zubok, Head of the Cold War Studies programme.
Research Cluster: Contemporary International History and the Global Cold War
Expertise: Interwar Period, Diplomatic and International History, Anglo-Soviet relations, Soviet Union, International Communism, Republican China, Imperialism, British Empire, Cold War