Soviet-Czechoslovak scientific-technical cooperation in the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras
Authors:   University of Geneva, Switzerland, Fiser Ondrej 
Published: December 2024

Economic and scientific-technical cooperation was a popular topic of research for socialist economists and political scientists during the Cold War. Already in the 1950s, a series of studies on the merits of this form of international rapprochement were written up. The outputs of these papers, however, are largely imbued with ideologized reasoning and conclusions. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, historians turned mainly to the study of the negative aspects of intra-bloc cooperation, such as show trials or environmental degradation, and the topic of scientific- technical cooperation became marginalized for decades. The aim of this article is to illustrate the impact, constraints, and evolution of the main currents of scientific-technical cooperation in the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras through the case of Czechoslovak-Soviet interaction. Archival sources suggest that it was the period of the 1950s and 1960s that was characterized by a fundamental transformation of the system of cooperation within the Eastern Bloc. The choice of the cooperation partners to be subjected to research is also not random. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia were among the countries with the strongest scientific- technical base within the Eastern Bloc, and their R&D activities were to a large extent complementary. The article seeks to propose a new periodization of the development of intra-bloc cooperation, map the main forms and fields of cooperation, and explore its impact on the economy and scientific-technical progress of both cooperation partners. The emphasis is placed on the sectors of heavy industry, nuclear physics, infrastructure, education, chemistry and other areas of science and technology that were of particular importance during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. An additional research task is to determine the extent to which cooperation was implemented because of political and ideological pressures and goals, and to what extent it was a „bottom-up“ activity initiated according to the genuine needs of research and manufacturing. Both micro and macro echelons of cooperation are analyzed to ensure the comprehensiveness of the present study. The first category is represented by individual scientists, technical staff, manufacturing companies and research institutes. At the macro level, the objectives and roles of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and the industrial ministries of both countries are examined. To achieve a depth of research, it was necessary to analyze a wide range of primary and secondary sources. In this respect, the fonds of the industrial ministries at the Czech National Archives were studied, supplemented by other primary sources from the Security Services Archive, the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva, and the Škoda Auto Archive. These primary sources were then complemented by the findings of both the communist-era literature, and the post-Velvet Revolution studies which offered a depoliticized critique of selected aspects of intra-bloc cooperation.