Article
ID: CBB842680788

A Matter of Courtesy: The Role of Soviet Diplomacy and Soviet “System Safeguards” in Maintaining Soviet Influence on Czechoslovak Science before and after 1968 (2020)

unapi
Science and politics Cross-national interaction Cold War 20th century, late Czechoslovakia Soviet Union

In 1969, a few short months after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sergei I. Prasolov, advisor to the Soviet Ambassador in Prague, informed František Šorm, President of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, at a formal meeting that he welcomed Šorm's suggestion to intensify scientific exchange between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Šorm politely declined this offer. Behind the veneer of diplomatic courtesy on the part of both actors, a real drama was taking place. Šorm and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences had actually never formulated such a request. To the contrary, since the late 1950s the academy had repeatedly pointed out that the Soviets were incapable of coordinating scientific activities in the Eastern Bloc. The Soviet system of academic cooperation within the Eastern Bloc had already begun to collapse after the Geneva Summit of 1955, where the Soviets opened the door to international collaboration across the Iron Curtain. Yet it was only in the late 1960s that the Soviets realized that while they dominated large-scale international collaboration, they had lost control of internal developments within the Eastern Bloc.

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Authors & Contributors
Durnová, Helena
Weiner, Sharon K.
Turchetti, Simone
Thompson, Nicholas
Tatarchenko, Ksenia
Sun, Li
Journals
Studies in Dialectics of Nature
Science Technology and Society
Science in Context
Osteuropa
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Publishers
Yale University Press
The MIT Press
Springer
Princeton University
National Geographic Society
Concepts
Cold War
Science and politics
Cross-national interaction
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Technology and politics
International cooperation
People
Tôn-Thất, Tùng
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
Places
Soviet Union
United States
Czechoslovakia
Antarctica
Nigeria
Russia
Institutions
The Akademgorodok Computer Center
Royal Society (Great Britain). European Science Exchange Programme
International Geophysical Year (IGY)
Akademiia Nauk SSSR
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