To what extent were Soviet engagements with the Third World characterized by solidarity during the Cold War? And to what extent did these same engagements conceal imperial ambitions? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alessandro Iandolo (UCL) talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how concrete development projects could be viewed quite differently by the different actors involved. He also talks about how his own perspective on these projects has changed, as he approaches them in his new research from different angles. If all of those involved came to be almost in agreement on one point, he argues, it was that the world-building exercises they were involved in were somehow second best when compared to the material and intellectual resources of an imagined West. Alessandro Iandolo is a lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, specializing in the history of the Soviet Union in the world. His first book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968, explored the Soviet Union's economic partnership with three newly-independent countries in West Africa during the Khrushchev era, winning the W. Bruce Lincoln prize for the best first monograph in Russian History, and the Marshall D. Shulman prize for the best monograph on the internationalrelations of the USSR from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.