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Big Effects of Small Science Diplomacy: Milislav Demerec Pulling Yugoslavia Out of the Soviet Embrace in the Early 1950s

The Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948–49, and the search for an alternative path to socialism that it prompted, became cornerstones of the identity of socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s attempts at Stalinization following World War Two and the country’s “opening to the West” in the 1950s have been studied primarily through the lens of high politics and ideology, often with little regard for how the process unraveled “on the ground.” I will argue that the history of natural sciences—biology in particular—offers an invaluable insight in the mechanisms of the process. Parallel to the official diplomatic efforts to bring Yugoslavia and the U.S. closer, the Croatian-born American geneticist, Milislav Demerec (1895–1966), a long-time director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, played a discrete but important role in countering Soviet influences among Yugoslav scientists. At a time when the Cold War science diplomacy was becoming increasingly ambitious, his was a small but effective enterprise. Demerec got involved in a controversy at the University of Sarajevo over introducing Michurinist biology to the curriculum in 1952, and strengthened the position of the anti-Lysenkoist camp in Yugoslavia. As opposed to a relatively slow pace of official scientific diplomacy, here the effects were seen quickly, and the episode reveals a readiness to address politically sensitive issues that high diplomacy often worked hard to suppress.

Yugoslavia ; history of science ; Lysenkoism ; anti-Lysenkoism ; Stalinist science ; Milislav Demerec

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