Anna Doel is a Historian at the American Institute of Physics and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
Scientific communication between the United States and the Soviet Union never ran smoothly, and the early cold war years almost brought it to a complete halt. At any other time in the past, a disconnect in the republic of letters between learned people from any two countries would probably go unnoticed. But the twentieth century ushered in global science—an understanding of interconnected planetary dynamics—and concepts so vast and complex that intellectual power and material resources available to a nation-state no longer sufficed to advance in the sciences. Transnational dialogue through professional society meetings, bilateral research, and joint exploration became integral to scientific life. Science also evolved into a powerful force in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. among other countries, serving nations by developing practicable knowledge and technology for industry, healthcare, and agriculture as well as warfare. As we know, the latter, particularly nuclear weapons, became the bone of early Cold War contention—and had a negative effect on scientific communication between the Western and Eastern Bloc, making post-WWII restoration, let alone expansion of U.S.-Soviet academic dialogue improbable.
My book Friends in Odd Places explores the unexpectedly productive relationship between American and Soviet researchers throughout the Cold War. The first and largest collaborative program in the sciences between a western and a socialist nation spanned four decades, eventually involved thousands of scientists and engineers, and left its mark on both academic communities and beyond. American-Soviet exchange contributed to nuclear non-proliferation negotiations (changing their course in one instance), protection of endangered species, and climate change discussions. It ensured the integration of Soviet experts into the global scientific community and played a significant part in establishing planetary data circulation that helped to build American big data. Dialogue progressed from minimal communication at the dawn of the Cold War to a small struggling inter-academy program for twenty representatives of the two communities to make brief, heavily restricted visits across the Iron Curtain, and in the détente of the 1970s, to a constellation of autonomous research projects in many disciplines—from radio astronomy to pollution control. Despite many hindrances born of diplomatic tensions, skillfully navigating the treacherous waters of science policy and bureaucracy, national security restrictions, cultural differences and language barriers, experts in natural sciences created programs for direct exchanges of ideas, materials, data, laboratory experiments, and field research—no small achievement for two countries at opposite ends of the Cold War.
Understanding the political climate in which U.S.-Soviet dialogue was embedded is important, as the exchange program operated under intergovernmental agreements and mirrored the political oscillations of advancing Cold War agendas and smoothing out its rough edges. Equally valuable is a historically accurate description of the organizational structure of the exchange and collaboration programs, especially as we learn of the delicate balance the National Academy of the United States (NAS) and the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (SAS, Soviet Academy of Sciences, for shorthand) achieved between citizen diplomacy and academic freedoms to sustain meaningful scientific dialogue. What is missing from this picture is the on-the-ground dynamics in exchange and collaboration that remain on the margins of historical research. Who were the researchers participating in these programs? What motivated them to volunteer and weather the storms of political and ideological fallout to find a common professional language? The majority of participants were core-level researchers in a variety of career stages and academic positions. Because of these historical actors’ varied visibility and presence in the archive, primary sources that would reveal their interests in and emotions toward the exchange require creative ways of locating them.
It was my hope that research in Consortium member institutions would broaden the source base for the book—it did. Exceeding expectations, the materials I was able to access expanded my view of the scientific exchange landscape. I visited seven Consortium repositories armed with this question: is there evidence of individual communication and, perhaps, travel among professional researchers that happened outside the official NAS-SAS exchange channels? It was vastly rewarding to learn about the reprint and specimen exchange between microbiologists, epidemiologists, and paleontologists at the Smithsonian Institution and numerous research facilities in the Soviet Union that was every bit as personal as it was professional—and was unrelated to the inter-academy exchange. At the Library of Congress’s manuscript division, the story of the Nobel Prize recipient in chemistry Glenn Seaborg’s campaign to nominate his Soviet colleague and good friend Vitalii Goldanskii for an award in the West demonstrates the level of personal involvement and willingness to dedicate time and effort to maintain professional communication that lasted, in this case, thirty years across the cold war divide.
I am deeply grateful to scholars at the two archives that were not on my initial list for bringing their collections to my attention and hosting me at the National Library of Medicine at NIH and in the University Archives at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus. Studying materials at NLM I learned the story of the medical U.S.-Soviet exchange that ran on a parallel track to the sciences ones. Historians of medicine have described brief episodes of the medical exchange in a handful of papers and books, and I had a chance to see more of it unfold in correspondence and reports by U.S. medical practitioners in the 1960s-1980s. What I found surprising was a degree of skepticism and patronizing attitudes toward Soviet medicine, a lot of it understandable but somewhat unwarranted. This shows that in medical exchange a common language of communication was harder to develop than in seismology or plasma physics. A notable exception from a rather indifferent crowd of American physicians was Michael DeBakey, the “super surgeon,” as a Russian colleague called him as early as 1959, the star of U.S. cardiovascular surgery who maintained a long-term relationship with Soviet physicians. At UIUC, the Siberian-born American anthropologist Demitri Shimkin pivoted his research to his region of birth in the 1980s. Unaffiliated with any intergovernmental or inter-academy exchange, he struck an independent agreement with the Kemerovo State University for a semester of research and teaching as a visiting scholar, supporting this adventure with a Fulbright Senior Lectureship. He then embarked on a quest to convince research entities, including the Smithsonian Institution, of the need to expand U.S.-Soviet collaboration in anthropology, archaeology, and ethnography.
These are three threads out of dozens I pulled from the boxes and folders, and the stories they tell are not even the most revealing or emotionally stunning in the bunch. The opportunity to visit these archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center, Smithsonian Archives, Library of Congress, and U.S. Naval Observatory Library and Archives gave my book project another dimension and two additional chapters. With gratitude for this fellowship, I now look forward to writing them.