Organizer: Karen Freeze
Chair: Slawomir Lotysz
Commentator: Elisabeth Van Meer

Papers:

Dagmara Jajezniak-Quast, “East-West Technology Transfer in Iron and Steel Industry during the Cold War.”
Karen Freeze, “Technological Innovation and the Permeable Iron Curtain: How the open-end spinning machine from Communist Czechoslovakia revolutionized the textile world.”
Pal Germuska, “The Breakout: the Third World. Licenses and R&D in the Hungarian military industry in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Until well after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Western scholars and practitioners alike assumed that technology in the Soviet satellite states was limited to space and military programs, and that industry was in a uniformly mediocre state. After all, the shops were half empty, the locally-produced consumer goods inferior, and exports consisted largely of raw or semi-finished products. The centrally planned command economies had proven notoriously inefficient and largely unable to compete with the West. Without market forces at work, local managers had no reason to innovate or improve productivity, even had they been so inclined.

Although this picture is largely accurate, notable exceptions to the rule demonstrate that the story is much more complex than previously understood. These exceptions occurred in a variety of industries, throughout the Soviet Bloc. Within a given industrial or business sector, innovative products and processes put their countries of origin on the map; outside of these sectors, however, these achievements are virtually unknown. How many people in the West, outside of optometry schools, know that soft contact lenses originated in communist Czechoslovakia? Or outside of laser physics that holography was very advanced in Russia and Bulgaria?

These papers, all based on extensive archival research and published sources, examine three different industries: iron and steel in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, and Czechoslovakia; military equipment in Hungary; and textile machines in Czechoslovakia. They illustrate different trajectories in the transfer of technology: steel to Austria and Sweden; military equipment to third world developing countries; and textile machines to Britain and the US. All demonstrate that the high level of technical and scientific education in the Soviet Bloc produced fruit when the motivation and resources were in place. To be sure, none of these industries served the consumer sector of the economy, but all of them gave meaning to the working lives of ordinary people, and special privileges to the leading scientists, engineers, and managers among them. Their stories, and the contribution they made to these industrial sectors within a complex social, economic, cultural, and political context, illuminate the permeability of the Cold War border known as the Iron Curtain.