Communist Czechoslovakia offered political asylum to over 15,000 people, mainly from Greece, Italy, and Spain, but also to a few Americans, Frenchmen, Iranians, and the like. Some of these refugees were prominent leftist scientists with an outstanding political career and background. One such person was George Wheeler, one of the creators of Roosevelt's New Deal policy and a close colleague of General Lucius D. Clay in post-war Germany, where he participated in the process of de-nazification and economic reconstruction. His career in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences followed the typical course of a Western Marxist and a social sciences scholar. Wheeler succumbed to the Communist ideology, made an excellent academic career (his books were translated to several East European languages), and after 1968 returned to the USA where he pursued his academic career. Czechoslovakia also provided a temporary home to the electrical engineer Morton Nadler, who sensed that his career in the US would be difficult because of his political opinion. The choice of Prague was motivated by the reputation of the Czechoslovak industry, like in the case of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant.

The study focuses on the exclusion of Czechoslovak scholars and scientists into exile during totalitarian regimes, ie in 1938/39-1945 (Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, Nazi occupation of the Czech lands) and in 1948-1989 (communist regime in Czechoslovakia) periods. Particular attention is paid to the participation of scholars and scientists in political exile institutions and in Czech and Slovak exile scientific and cultural institutions.

Utenkov’s contribution to microbiology rests primarily on his continuous cultivation devices for studying bacterial growth, and secondarily on his inference that under fixed growth conditions (i.e. a fixed physiologic state) the pleomorphic propensities of most bacterial cells are limited. He appears to have been the first person to utilize purposefully designed, highly sophisticated, modular instrumentation to prolong bacterial exponential growth, in the hope of enabling his cells to express fully their morphologic (and biochemical) potentials, though he apparently failed to grasp the major (quantitative) principles of chemostat culture. The preparation of numerous “microscopic movies” and, subsequently, his scrutiny of many hundreds of colonies in his “bacterial hydridization” studies indicate that Utenkov appreciated the importance of large sample sizes for drawing generalizations from qualitative descriptions.

History of thermoscopy and thermometry is reviewed showing the role of temperature degrees including the forgotten logarithmic scale. The importance of natural laws of energy, motion, least action, and thermal efficiency is discussed. The meaning of idiomatic terms— thermal physics, thermodynamics, thermostatics, thermotics, and thermal analysis—is specified and revealed within two parallel developed branches of thermal science. Itemized 105 references with titles.

The following article is a case study on the relationship between expertise and political de-cision-making in the "Eastern Bloc." It focuses on the attempt to reform state socialism, which took place in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. This effort was linked to the extensive involvement of experts in the policy-making of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz). Using the example of the research on the "Scientific and Technological Revolu¬tion" (STR), headed by philosopher Radovan Richta, this article examines the close ties between high politics and knowledge production in state socialism. This article analyzes the STR project from the perspective of the intellectual history of Reform Communism and situates the STR theory in a broader context of post-Stalinist political thought. In its second part this study examines how the STR research team was established. This in¬stitutional history shows that the STR project was not only the result of intellectual and polit...

In the first decade after the 1948 Communist coup d'état, private art collecting in Czechoslovakia experienced a great deal of ideologically motivated oppression. Targeted, systemic actions were taken against so-called "former people" and other representatives of the "defeated" social classes who had hitherto been the vehicles of the art collecting phenomenon. The persecution peaked in 1959 and 1960 with show trials against eminent pre-war art collectors, former representatives of the bourgeoisie. This provoked an extensive wave of forced dispossessions of private artistic assets and the significant mobility of large, prominent art collections from the private to the public sphere in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The article concerns several model cases of such trials resulting in the confiscation of property, the enrichment of the leading public collections, and exemplary punishments, as well as cases of other "soft" ways of dispossessing individuals through the widespread Czech institution of the so-called legally forced “gift” / “donation” of art equivalent in value to an inheritance or property tax that had been levied. Court records preserved in whole or in part facilitate the more detailed reconstruction of the trial of the entrepreneur, expert appraiser and collector Jaroslav Borovička (1912–2009), or the case of the entrepreneur and collector Václav Butta (1888–1968), who was closely associated with the case of the criminal prosecution of Emanuel Poche (1903–1987), a leading art historian and the director of the Museum of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. These remarkable, unprecedented examples provide a certain opportunity for comparison; in the case of Jaroslav Borovička, the court found him eligible for prosecution due to his extensive “organized speculation”, while in the case of the significantly older entrepreneur and altruistic benefactor Václav Butta and his family, the regime was intentionally seeking his humiliation and sought to liquidate not just his assets but also his social capital and, as a consequence, to destroy this human example of the former bourgeois layer of society. Both trials resulted in the significant subsequent transfer of the confiscated movable art (many pieces) to the National Gallery in Prague (NGP). As we can also say on the basis of several archival sources, the probable initiator of this campaign against these other collectors was Rudolf Barák (1915–1995), the Interior Minister, Prime Minister and the second most powerful politician in the country during the late 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, figuring then as a specific example of a collector from the new political elites. As a powerful, potentially dangerous political person with non-conformist opinions and presumed direct contacts to Moscow, he himself became the victim of a political complot at the beginning of 1962. After a quick show trial he was imprisoned and all of his property was confiscated, including the key piece of his collection, one of Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar (1941). Although he repeatedly asked for its retrieval and restitution, he was never successful, nor were his heirs. His not large but nonetheless concentrated art collection of about 50 items remains at the NGP to this day. As an example of a "silent" but actually forced dispossession of a living collector, we discuss the case of the famous Czech art historian Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960) and his collection. Another case of dispossession on the basis of forced “donation”, which on the legal level was understood as equivalent in value to levying an inheritance or property tax, applied also to the fate of the most important, famous Czech art collection of the 20th century. Kramář, as an art historian, a colleague of Max Dvořák (1874–1921) from the Vienna School and director-emeritus of the NGP, is recognized as one of the first European collectors of French analytic cubism. He was accused of non-payment of the so-called “millionaire tax” and forced at the end of his life to donate the better part of his collection to the state. Decades later his heirs sued the state for return of the valuable highlights of the collection but were unsuccessful. Kramář’s situation was very similar to the famous porcelain collector Joachim Utz / aka Rudolf Just (1895–1972) in the story by the British novelist Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin collected the material for his book in communist Prague at the beginning of the 1960s and his novel is a case study featuring almost no literary hyperbole, based on the real state of affairs. Much more frequent than forced donations from still living (and aging) artists / collectors were cases of the state forcing massive donations from heirs. In these situations the heirs of significant interwar art collectors were subjected to inheritance tax levied at an amount they were unable to repay in any way other than by selling a substantial part of their bequest. As there was no free market and practically also no official market for modern and avant-garde art at that time, this allowed the state to ask practically anything of the heirs. Moreover, the state authorities both determined the amount of the tax due and simultaneously appraised the art pieces. The heirs were caught in a foolproof, sophisticated legal trap with no reasonable escape available. Under such conditions the sons of the significant interwar lawyer and prominent collector of modern Czech and French art František Čeřovský (1981–1962) “donated” the valuable part of their inheritance to the NGP. The biggest collection was involuntarily “donated” this way by the heirs of one of the most famous painters and collectors, a leader of the avant-garde and a theoretician, the “Czech Picasso“ Emil Filla (1882–1953). The state along with the NGP employees asked for more than 400 items from his estate, half of what was found in the artist's studio. Half of this large, valuable body of work was the artist’s own (including early cubist) life work, while the other half was his personal art collection, including Renaissance bronzes and huge sets of rare, non-European artworks. The mobility of the artistic assets flowing especially to the NGP as acquisitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s eventually resulted in a very significant enrichment of its holdings, or rather, completed a rather essential part of the lacunae existing primarily in the structure of its contemporary and modern art collection. Consequently, this gave rise to completely new exposition and exhibition outputs devoted to modern art in Czechoslovakia after 1962. Most of the non-voluntarily transferred collections became the subject of physical restitutions in the 1990s (with the exception of Barák’s and Kramář’s art pieces). Nevertheless, we are still waiting for the intellectual, moral restitution of their names and fates, as well as for a revival of the significance of research into the provenance of artworks in the Czech Republic.