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Fifty years ago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was having a chilling effect on scientists working there

“THE scientists are getting out.” Our headline on 9 January 1969 referred to a significant moment in cold-war history. Teachers, doctors, researchers and students were leaving Czechoslovakia in their thousands, and had been doing so since 21 August of the previous year.

That was when the tanks had rolled in. Around 250,000 troops from the USSR, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded the country, bringing an abrupt and decisive end to the Prague Spring, a period of liberalisation and democratisation that had begun earlier that year.

“When, in January 1968, the Stalinist party-leadership was replaced by new men who appreciated the importance of science, most scientists were convinced that the time of change had actually arrived,” we wrote. “The Soviet invasion… came as a great shock.”

By January 1969, several centres of research “were practically brought to a standstill by the depletion of their staffs”. Many scientists had been actively involved in attempting to reform the regime, but “only a few left the country because of personal danger”, we wrote. “The real reason for this massive exodus is the justified fear that the bad old days will return.”

Those days had not been favourable for scientists. “Leading posts in government and industry were taken over by people who not only lacked education but were hostile to it,” we wrote. “Subsequent purges made it quite clear that a university degree was not only a great disadvantage but often a source of danger.” Even if someone managed to become a researcher, “the classification of scientific theories and results as either ‘Marxist’ or ‘bourgeois’ made it impossible for scientists in East Europe to take part in the important advances achieved in the field of genetics, cybernetics, information theory and psychology”.

That situation was set to continue for 20 years. It was not until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that Czech scientists could truly restart their work. By then, we wrote in 1990, the country had lost a generation of scientists.