Authors

Discussion

In the mid-1980s, the USSR initiated negotiations with the Warsaw Pact member-states on their future economic, scientific, and technological cooperation with Western developed economies as well as the developing world. In a reaction to an increasingly harming Western technological embargo against socialist countries, the Warsaw Pact was to take countermeasures to protect its “scientific-technological” potential. As a result, the Intergovernmental Commission on Multilateral Export Control was established in 1987 by six members. Its main task was to compile a secret list of scientific issues, technologies, and goods which the allies were prohibited from sharing or selling to partners in the West and Third World. In many respects, it was meant as an analogy to the Western COCOM. Albeit due to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the project was short-lived and had little effect, it seems to be a serious try by the USSR to curb the transfer of some scientific data, technologies, and related products between East, West, and South in the late Cold War. The proposed paper examines what documents by secret services, particularly the Czechoslovak economic counter-intelligence, reveal about the motives behind the Soviet initiative. The analysis might give a hint of what kind of Eastern scientific research and technological development were interested by the West, and to what extent they corresponded with the know-how that the Warsaw Pact’s new restrictive mechanism was to protect. Attention is paid also to the question of why the Eastern secret services monitored closely agreements on scientific and technological cooperation between the Warsaw Pact countries and their Western partners, suggesting that worries about revealing the use of illegally obtained Western technologies, or the real state of Eastern research and development played more important role than attempts to protect some unique know-how and solutions.