1948 and 1968 – Dramatic Milestones in Czech and Slovak History by Laura Cashman

Author:Laura Cashman [Cashman, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317999621
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

The era of optimism

The foundations for advancements in the natural sciences in the 1960s had already been prepared from the 1950s onwards. For many contemporaries, communism as the ‘scientific world ideology’7 had been the key to solving the problems of scientific work. In this vein, Czech communists claimed that the ‘bourgeois society’ of the First Republic (1918–1938) had undervalued its natural scientists (Winters 1994, pp. 275, 281) and in communist ideology they saw a chance to strengthen the position of science in society. The establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1952 was therefore a project that the Communist Party eagerly advocated. The Soviet Union had been the first country with a government policy and public support for science (Graham 1993; Roll-Hansen 2005) and it offered an attractive model for those who wished for a more efficient science policy. Against this background, it is understandable that it was not only communist natural scientists who welcomed the organisational changes (Kiser 1989, p. 94). The goal of the newly established Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences to combine research and industrial applications furthered the strengthening of physical, chemical and technical research. The Academy of Sciences grew rapidly as did the number of its institutions. One of its greatest international victories in the 1950s was the award of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1959 to Jaroslav Heyrovský, who was the first Czechoslovak to win the Nobel Prize (Winters 1994, p. 281).

However, rebuilding the scholarly community and setting up a ‘socialist’ framework for research in the 1950s proved difficult, and the politically motivated character of the changes made them largely inconsistent. Efforts included various measures which affected organisations, disciplines and individual scientists. However, diverging rules in different institutions and perhaps even within them led to some paradoxical outcomes. This is seen most clearly in attempts to secure the ideological purity of the scholarly community by carrying out political purges at the universities and high schools. Although the Czech universities were purged soon after the communist takeover in 1948, at first the measures hardly touched the natural sciences at the level of professors (Connelly 2000, p. 132) and dependence on the intellectual capital of natural scientists formed an everlasting dilemma for the state. One concrete and radical attempt to resolve this dilemma took place in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 when the Party attempted to reassert control and carried out a purge in the universities in 1958. However, in a number of cases the purges did not remove their targets from the scientific community. Significantly, the Academy leadership was able to offer professional asylum to many scientists who were thrown out of universities in the political purges of 1958. Paradoxically, as noted above, some of them, including Otto Wichterle, were even offered the opportunity to establish completely new institutions (Kostlán 2001, p. 96).

Part of the ‘Sovietisation’ of Czechoslovak science in the 1950s was the categorisation of some existing theories as ‘capitalist’ or ‘imperialist’ and suggestions to replace them with ‘socialist’ ones. It

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