engleski

Yugoslav Scientists Looking for a Role-Model in Achieving Modernity, 1944-1950

While most East European countries became part of the Soviet bloc gradually between 1945 and 1948, Yugoslavia was reestablished in 1945 as a closest Soviet ally, which it remained until the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, although it took a couple of years for the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to start reexamining its commitment to Marxism-Leninism and position in the Cold War. Struggling to rebuild a destroyed country, the party kept emphasizing, albeit in vague terms, the role of scientists in the reconstruction and the long-term goal of achieving socialist modernity. This paper examines how Yugoslav scientists (re)negotiated their professional and political identities on domestic and international level after 1945. Younger scientists, some of whom had studied abroad before the war and joined the Communist-led armed resistance in 1941-1945, were tasked with modernizing and politically realigning Yugoslav science. Irene Joliot Curie’s collaborator, Pavle Savić, worked with Pyotr Kapitsa in the USSR in 1944-47 and was supposed to replicate Soviet nuclear program in Yugoslavia, while Werner Heisenberg’s student, Ivan Supek, reflected on dialectical materialism in modern science, while maintaining close connections to Western intellectuals. As most of their colleagues, they had mixed feelings regarding the prospects of the post-war world in the light of technological advances. They believed that a new global order should be based on scientific rationality—this time, however, strictly subjugated to “humanist principles, ” to avoid future total wars and genocides facilitated by science—but they disagreed whether nuclear energy would “naturally lead” to socialism or, as Supek suggested in a prophetic 1944 speech, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the end of the world—and what all of that meant for Yugoslavia.

Socialist Yugoslavia ; science ; ideology ; Stalinization ; de-Stalinization

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