Czechoslovakia and Austria were two of the main weapons producers of the Cold War, but are rarely thought of among the conflict’s major players. Moreover, if research has shed important light on arms and their uses in regions like the Middle East and Africa, then the conditions in which they were made are less clearly understood. Focusing on arms workers, businesspeople and politicians in Czechoslovakia and Austria between 1954 and 1994, Linking Arms corrects this, arguing that “smallness” allowed representatives of Czechoslovakia and Austria in the arms trade room to maneuver and a relative lack of scrutiny not enjoyed by larger players. We reveal, furthermore, how similarities and continued connections characterized the experiences of those in the arms sector in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, despite the Cold War's political shifts.
Linking Arms tests how infrastructures, technological know-how, and production techniques dating from the Habsburg Era and the Second World War continued to shape the international trajectories of Austria and Czechoslovakia’s arms industries into the Cold War. The project reveals the influence wielded by small states, and highlights the role of non-state actors in the period’s arms trade. By taking a transnational approach, it illuminates the Cold War’s significant grey arms trade and techniques of sanctions evasion spanning ideological and geographical divides. It thus enriches: A) Central European history, B) Cold War history, and C) transnational history.
Using oral histories, business, police and government files, we compare Austrian and Czechoslovak production and distribution strategies, and map actor networks common to both. A WEAVE grant allows multiple researchers to approach the topic from different angles beyond national borders.
Arms production shaped interactions between workers, businesspeople, and politicians in Central Europe and underlay the region’s relationship with the rest of the world. By mapping this, Linking Arms demonstrates that political ruptures were less important for the region’s arms sector than previously assumed. Spotlighting the weapons that were most prevalent and destructive during the Cold War, it marries two often separately-told stories: of European economic stability on the one hand, and of conflict beyond the European continent on the other.
The project is divided into four work packages:
1. “Comrades in Arms: A Global History of Czechoslovak Weapons, 1954-1994”—Dr. Rosamund Johnston (Vienna)
Czechoslovakia was perhaps the biggest exporter of small arms to Africa throughout the 1960s. And lurking in the background of Cold War crises—from Guatemala and Suez in the 1950s to Angola and Afghanistan in the 1980s—were Czechoslovak weapons. This work package focuses in turns on the state’s leaders, arms dealers, munitions workers, international students and the general public to show the complex web of interactions upon which Czechoslovakia’s international weapons trade relied. It uses corporate archives and oral histories to chart how the connections that arms dealers fostered extended beyond guns, and how arms workers were encouraged to understand themselves as part of a larger socialist world. It reveals the sovereignty of Soviet “satellite” states during the Cold War and socialist internationalism’s shifting forms.
Following the flow of commodities from the Czechoslovak provinces to the Cold War’s flashpoints, Comrades in Arms links the local to the global, excavating the role played by Czechoslovak arms in shaping global conflict in the twentieth century. Conversely, it examines how global conflict shaped class configurations and gender relations on the factory floor. Considering, for example, how the protracted boom of the Cold War arguably feminized Czechoslovakia’s weapons industry, WP 1 reveals how enmeshed Central Europeans’ Cold War sensibilities and experiences were with the hot wars that “weaponized” the conflict outside Europe. By placing Czechoslovakia’s Cold War history into its imperial, democratic and wartime context, it qualifies claims that socialist Czechoslovakia simply followed Moscow’s orders in its weapons sales.
Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe´s Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in March 2024. Her research has been published in Central European History and a number of edited volumes. She has also written for the Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the author of one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.
2. “Arms Town Steyr as Home Front in the Global Cold War”—Leo Stauber (Prague)
Steyr, historically Austria's primary center of arms production, was home to a significant workforce employed by Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG during the Cold War. This company manufactured rifles and tanks, among other products--many of which were sold to various foreign governments, particularly in the "Third World." This dissertation project aims to provide a microhistorical perspective on the effects of the globalization of Cold War arms industries at production sites like Steyr. By investigating the international linkages and connections fostered through arms production in Steyr, the research seeks to illustrate how the dynamics of the global arms trade influenced local politics, the economy, and daily life in the Upper Austrian arms town.
Leo Stauber studied history at the University of Regensburg (B.A.) and the University of Vienna (M.A.) Currently, he is a Ph.D. student at Charles University in Prague, where he is involved in the research project Linking Arms: Central Europe’s Weapons Sector, 1954 - 1994. His research interests include Contemporary Austrian and German History, Global History of the Cold War and History of the Arms Industry and Arms Exports.
3. “The Logistics of the Arms Trade in Cold War Central Europe”—Dr. Tomáš Nigrin (Prague)
How did arms sold from Communist Central Europe actually move around? With vendors at times deliberately mislabeling arms shipments, painstaking attention to details housed in multiple archives is required to retrace weapons’ trajectories. By undertaking this task, WP3 brings into focus the often-surprising coalitions of actors who had to work together—sometimes across state borders, and frequently unhappily—to keep Central Europe’s lucrative arms trade on track.
The state-owned enterprises Czechoslovak Ocean Shipping and Czechoslovak Danubius Shipping officially carried and unofficially smuggled arms from the Eastern bloc overseas. But if it underpinned the lucrative export of finished goods to overseas markets, then transportation also secured (or complicated) the incoming supply of parts for the arms trade. WP 3 examines how, specifically, the daily realities of waterborne and railway transport and their limitations shaped the Czechoslovak weapons industry.
Issues with deliveries could provoke diplomatic incidents, as the deteriorating relationship between one of Czechoslovakia’s first high-profile customers, Egypt, and Prague make clear (see NA CZ ÚV KSČ Antonín Novotný, 1962). And diplomatic incidents could fundamentally alter the logistics of arms deliveries—prompting Czechoslovakia temporarily to stop using its own ships for this purpose following the French impounding of the vessel Lidice and its international fallout in 1959 (see Krátká, 2021). Viewed through the prisms of transport and transportation, WP3 sheds unique light on the shifting position that the arms industry assumed in Czechoslovakia’s relations with the countries receiving, intercepting, and transmitting its shipments. It shows how these diplomatic relations were, moreover, interlinked with the technologies and the daily actions of workers in the transport sector.
Ass. Prof. Tomáš Nigrin (1981) studied Area Studies, German Studies and Modern History at the Charles University in Prague, Free University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His research interests cover German post-war history, current political development in Germany and history of transportation. He has participated in many national and international research projects, and spent two months in 2022 as a research fellow at the Research Centre for the History of Transformation at the University of Vienna. He is currently working on an international FWF-GA ČR project Linking Arms: Central Europe’s Weapons Industries, 1954-1994.
4. “Austria as Exporter of Czechoslovak Weapons, 1954-1994”—Mojmír Stránský (Vienna)
Eastern Bloc arms exported through Austria ended up in conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and later Yugoslavia. WP4 examines the motivations of the vendors and clients who sought to organize weapons sales in this indirect way.
To do so, our research traces interactions between Austrian businesspeople and those active in the Czechoslovak arms trade. It focuses on those like Otto Dittrich, a Linz-based businessman, who visited Prague in May 1986 to explore the possibility of purchasing hand grenades and ammunition on behalf of an Indonesian firm. The Czechoslovak arms vendors and secret police handling Dittrich’s request found it in no way unusual, for it was far from the first overture of this sort that they had received (ABS, 1986). If Dittrich was representative of the dozens of Austrian nationals documented in the Czech Security Forces’ archives seeking to purchase arms for third parties, then he was equally representative of a broader Austrian willingness to engage with Eastern bloc military industries ushered in by (and outlasting) Chancellor Bruno Kreisky’s rule (Graf, 2016). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the American CIA repeatedly found Austrian arms dealers to be crucial middlemen in what they termed the “grey market” in Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czechoslovak arms (CIA, 1984).
Bringing together archival materials revealing details of Czechoslovak arms sales through Austria, WP4 explores the mechanics of the latter state’s still poorly understood Cold War arms trade, and elucidates more generally the contours of the period’s state-to-state, grey, and black arms markets. Noting the important political realignments of the Kreisky era and their consequences for entrepreneurs like Dittrich, our longue-durée approach shows in fact how his period in office allowed for the strengthening of earlier networks facilitating Czechoslovak arms sales through Austria (see CIA, 1952).
Univ.-Ass. Mojmír Stránský MA (1969) studies Eastern European history at the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna. His research interests include History of Central and Eastern Europe; Cold War; Oral History; History of Transformation 1989, Voluntarism in State Socialism, History of Associations, Czech and Slovak Minority in Austria.
