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Research Collaboration in the Soviet Bloc
Exploring the Relevance of a Socialist International Organisation in the 1970s and 1980s
My project deals with the ‚Scientific-Technological Cooperation’ (STC) within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). This was an international organisation of up to ten socialist countries of the ‘Soviet bloc’. CMEA’s self-representation and the institutional development of its STC suggest that this field of activity had a major significance for the organisation, especially after 1970. The more surprising is that there are hardly any historiographic studies on its emergence. Furthermore, also the scientific cooperation within the ‘Soviet bloc’ more generally, of which CMEA’s cooperation was only one part, is not very well known. In my project, I will explore this part of the border-crossing cooperation within the ‘Soviet bloc’. I will investigate its structures, research topics, actors and their motives as well as its political, economic and academic relevance. Particularly, I focus on the agency of the GDR and CMEA’s Moscow-based secretariat in this field of the organisation’s activity during the 1970s and 1980s. My case studies include applied research in the areas of agriculture (mineral fertilisers), forestry (mechanisation) and environmental protection (air pollution control). Also, I will look at inter-bloc cooperation of experts of these fields in international organisations like the FAO and the UN-ECE.
I strive to contribute to three interconnected research fields: a) the relevance and the room of manoeuvre of international organisations in the ‘Soviet bloc’; b) the political/diplomatic, economic and academic importance of the CMEA’s STC for the involved governments, scientists and scientific institutions; c) the inter-bloc cooperation of experts within Europe in specialised networks and organisations.
Biographical Note
Since 2013, Martin Bemmann has been a lecturer at the University of Freiburg. He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Freiburg for a study on German debates about forest decline in the twentieth century. In early 2021 Martin finished a second book project (‘Habilitation’) concerned with the establishment and development of international economic statistics between 1850 and 1950. Currently, he is working on the project on CMEA as well as on a second one dealing with the role timber businesses played in European industrialisation processes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In 2011 Martin was a visiting scholar at the University of East Anglia (UK). In 2012/13 he lectured at the University of Dresden. During the academic year 2016/17, he was a Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and in autumn of 2021 he will be a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. During the summer term 2021, Martin served as an acting professor for modern history at the University of Freiburg.