Technology Transfer and Soviet Modernization (Using the Materials of Head Scientific Research Institutes)

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of technology transfer in the conditions of the “cold war”. Along with the existing research in the field of technology transfer, the contribution to the understanding of Soviet modernization through the economic and technological cooperation between the USSR and the West in the 1950s and 1960s has been made. The focus of this work is on the transfer in the field of physical and chemical research. The authors studied the official documents of the head Research Institute of Physics and Chemistry named after L. Ya. Karpov in the Russian state archive in Samara. The available materials give examples of situations that initiated borrowing, show how these situations were implemented, interacted with each other. The authors traced the process of adaptation and institutional support of technology, using methods of analysis of transfers, consistently comparing the situation before and after borrowing, paying special attention to the phenomena arising “at the border”. The documents show that the political factor largely determined the nature of the technology transfer. The strategy of interaction with capitalist countries was built on the background of serious efforts of the Soviet political elite to present cooperation as only a demonstration of achievements of Soviet science and technology. At the same time, the desire of state bodies to ensure access of Soviet researchers to Western developments is a confirmation that it was possible to achieve the most effective results in cooperation. The logic of such relations, as the materials studied show, was built not only in the framework of state modernization programs, but also on the basis of research interests of scientists. The existing objective prerequisites, even in the conditions of ideological confrontation, contributed to the active network interaction of scientific community.