Cybernetics, computing and automation: these three words were as key to the Cold War confrontation as nuclear arms, ideological conflicts and iron curtains. Not only was the high technology of the late twentieth century a component part of the weaponry systems that fought the Cold War’s conflicts, it was also the instrumental cog of the economic competition between East and West, as well as the symbolic fight for who could build the ‘perfect’ future.Footnote 1 The Iron Curtain’s technological impenetrability, however, has been challenged by technological, economic and comparative histories. Metaphors have replaced ‘iron’ with ‘nylon’ and ‘silicon’, and ‘curtain’ with ‘membrane’.Footnote 2 The Coordinating Committee for Export Controls (CoCom), the US-led embargo of high technology transfer to the Eastern Bloc, placed computing technology at the top of the list, alongside nuclear secrets.Footnote 3 Yet, through a variety of licit and illicit means, the Eastern Bloc countries participated in the information age more successfully than often thought. While arguments often point to the failure to transition to the post-industrial age with its socio-economic consequences as a main reason for European communism’s collapse after 1989, this overdetermines the vital and sometimes thriving pockets of technological innovation that existed.Footnote 4
One of these pockets was the Bulgarian computer industry. In the mid-1980s, socialist Bulgaria held over 45 per cent of the electronic export trade within the Eastern Bloc and was talked about as a miraculous and surprising story behind the Berlin Wall.Footnote 5 To create such an industrial presence in the communist world, Bulgarian socialists utilised all possible channels, from licences to spying to international technical assistance. One of the understudied aspects of this story is the role of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), a key part in technological transfer and specialisation within Europe and beyond. Among the many ways Bulgaria developed its electronic industry, UNIDO played a crucial yet understudied role. Created in 1966 and established in Vienna in the wake of the first UN Trade and Development Conference (UNCTAD), UNIDO was designed to deal above all with North–South relations. Its main goal was to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries in the field of industry, viewed as a key part for development. UNIDO, like UNCTAD, had larger political goals, as expressed in the Lima Declaration adopted in its General Conference in 1975,Footnote 6 which set as its goal to have a quarter (25 per cent) of the global industrial production situated in developing countries by the year 2000 (stated as ‘Lima Targets’). But unlike UNCTAD, UNIDO also developed a practical approach, favouring technical assistance, as evidenced by its records in Vienna, which mainly deal with providing experts and training, networking expertise or helping governments in their quest for UNDP funds.Footnote 7
This technical assistance also included Eastern Europe. Despite the official priority of North–South relations in its agenda, UNIDO had a special relationship with the Eastern Bloc.Footnote 8 Industrial development was central to the visions of both UNIDO and the socialist countries, a component of both what it meant to be developed and what the future was to look like.Footnote 9 UNIDO was ideologically ‘bivalent’ rather that neutral, dealing with market and planned economies on an equal footing, which benefited the socialist countries in their search for partners. UNIDO also favoured the idea of industrial planning in all its forms, again bringing the agency close to the Eastern Bloc countries, as it did not ‘discriminate’ against central planning. In practice, UNIDO also developed technical assistance projects in some socialist countries: Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, rather, were considered as contributors: the limit between the developed and the developing world ran through Eastern Europe.
UNIDO was thus a key international organisation that contributed to the ‘stitching together’ of the pan-European economic zone that had been broken apart by the Cold War’s start. Bulgaria, like other Eastern European states, had been part of a common economic European space before the Second World War. It participated in the unequal exchange common to the inter-war period, seeking investment from abroad while exporting largely agricultural commodities like tobacco.Footnote 10 The Cold War broke apart this space through not just the geopolitical iron curtain but also the curtailing of economic cooperation and exchange through the trade embargos instituted by CoCom. A consequence of this, together with the desire to create alternative modernities in terms of separate economic spaces, spurred the Soviet Union to create a common Eastern European economic space, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon).Footnote 11 Yet the thawing of the Cold War after Stalin’s death, and especially the détente years, opened up a fruitful space for the re-establishment of European economic cooperation across the ideological divide.Footnote 12 A range of new or older international organisations contributed to the ‘re-stitching’ of the European economic space. Many centred on Vienna, which détente turned into a truly international city through institutions such as the UNESCO Vienna Centre,Footnote 13 the International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAAE)Footnote 14 and UNIDO itself.Footnote 15 Also established in Vienna, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) offered openings in the Cold War logic of confrontation, bringing together West and East in the pursuit of common goals and fighting common problems through technical and scientific expertise.Footnote 16 In Geneva, the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE),Footnote 17 created in 1947 with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal as Executive Secretary, maintained a common space of discussion throughout the Cold War.Footnote 18 The identification of converging economic and social trends and problems in both Eastern and Western Europe was reflected especially in the planning thinking that developed on and between both sides.Footnote 19 This led to a growing East–West cooperation that ultimately resulted in the Helsinki agreements and their important economic chapter in 1975.Footnote 20
This paper examines this relationship to make several points that complicate our understanding of technology transfer and the politics of knowledge in the Cold War. Firstly, we need to reassess the role of UNIDO programmes and the wider technological assistance framework available to all Eastern Bloc countries in the creation of high technology sectors. Secondly, while the Bulgarians’ interest in receiving UNIDO assistance might be more obvious, the relation was not unilateral – the international organisation itself had its own goals in Bulgaria, eventually also utilising the country as both a source of personnel and a part of its international agenda. Thirdly, bringing together sources from the Bulgarian archives and UNIDO’s institutional archive, the paper will raise the issue of the discrepancy in the source base, that is, the overall silence in Bulgarian discussions of the contributions made by Western technical experts. Thus, the paper shows the porousness of the iron curtain, the nature of the exchange and the competing models that were not unilaterally applied; at the same time, its methodological and archival angle also addresses the wider question of how East–West exchanges were instrumentalised and downplayed in national narratives or spun by international organisations for their own interests.
The paper will first investigate how the institute was set up and what UNIDO’s initial contribution was, highlighting the importance of international technical assistance in socialism’s modernisation, and the porousness of the technological embargo. As NIPKIP gathered strength, so did its relation to UNIDO change. Each side had different interests in this exchange, with UNIDO interested in using its help for the Bulgarians as a success story in its overall strategy. As such, the paper will also show how Bulgaria was used as part of UNIDO’s strategy to promote its agenda of technology transfer to the global south – the Second World becoming a way station to the ‘Third’. The final section addresses the absences in Bulgarian top-level archives and memoirs about UNIDO’s contribution to the national electronic industry, juxtaposed with the presence of the organisation in oral history and the memories of NIPKIP engineers.
Bulgarian Automation in National and International Perspective
Design institutes in automation, computing and electronics were key to building the successful and qualitatively new utopian economy of the socialist future – a tool for both economic development and total human freedom from want and menial labour. These technologies were part of a general turn towards cybernetics after the Second World War. Cybernetics was defined as the ‘the study of control and communication in both animals and machines’ by its founder Norbert Wiener.Footnote 21 The application of cybernetics to not just computing and biology but also management, economics and governance quickly took off in the West, and with a delay (due to Stalinist science dubbing it a ‘reactionary pseudoscience’ until the mid-1950s) in the East.Footnote 22 As Ronald Kline points out, it eventually suffered a ‘disunity’, with national schools emerging, but the term itself also became subsumed within other disciplines in the West (organisation theory, neuroscience, etc.).Footnote 23
Yet its models of feedback (increasingly applied to economic and political organisations) and methods were key to West and East. In the West, it helped its portrayal of itself as the harbinger of the new industrial civilisation and its promise for modernisation – eventually also in its libertarian pose, increasingly trumpeted by non-state actors in the emerging Silicon Valley from the 1970s onwards.Footnote 24 In the socialist world’s case, cybernetics captured the imagination of parties and thinkers alike, leading to projects from a ‘Soviet Internet’ to automate planning, to projects of democratic socialism far away from Moscow.Footnote 25 Automated machines were the future in not just economic growth but also the very transformation of labour and leisure. Thus, Bulgaria’s automatic dreams and the international technical involvement in them are an illuminating prism of how the two worlds met, exchanged and tailored their interactions to their own professional, institutional or ideological goals.
When the communist party took power in Bulgaria in the 1940s, the country was over 80 per cent agricultural and rural – a case of underdevelopment highlighted in the incipient development economics of pre-1945 European thinkers – and seemed far away from even being able to participate in this ‘cybernetic moment’. Undergoing breakneck Stalinist-style industrialisation in the 1950s and early 1960s, it built up the hallmarks of socialist industrialisation – steel, coal, power, dams, chemical works – and urbanised extremely rapidly. By the 1960s, however, the extensive period of growth was tapering off and the Bulgarian elite was facing a financial debt crisis. It was clear that new mechanisms and industries must be sought if Bulgaria was to recapture its impressive growth. At the same time, intensive growth – getting more productivity out of each worker – was also needed. The prospects did not look good as Bulgaria was relatively poor in natural resources and had been assigned largely agricultural niches – which it wanted to break out of – in the emergent division of labour within Comecon, the Eastern Bloc’s international economic organisation. Agriculture and slow growth were, of course, not the hallmarks of socialist modernity – nor were they likely to provide a golden export that could help the country avoid further financial problems. Within this conjuncture, key figures in the country’s technological elite such as Professor Ivan Popov convinced the leader, Todor Zhivkov, and the Politburo that the electronic industry was a panacea to all these ills.Footnote 26
When Bulgaria started to invest in this key sector in the mid-1960s, no country in the Eastern Bloc had true mass production of computers or automation devices. Popov, a far-sighted economic organiser, could see that if Bulgaria invested at this moment, it could leapfrog supposedly more advanced industries in the region such as those of East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Utilising contacts with the Japanese firm Fujitsu, the Bulgarians managed to get a licence for mass production; at the same time, the government turned the state security agency’s scientific intelligence arm into a veritable procurement bureau for the industry. Through increasing licit and illicit means, Bulgaria managed to secure lucrative specialisations in the late 1960s division of electronic labour in Comecon, including processors such as the ES-1020 (part of the new, Unified System series of computers that all countries in the Bloc produced, based on the IBM 360) and memory devices (the real golden egg, providing the majority of profits in the Bulgarian electronic sector). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this focus grew, with Bulgaria moving into also producing industrial robots and components, personal computers, networking devices and whole automated systems for industry and service work. This allowed it to capture a leading presence in the Eastern Bloc’s electronic market by the late 1980s.Footnote 27
The computer was not just a source of profit but also a way to solve a number of pressing issues: ensure Bulgaria’s industrial pedigree and place in the international socialist economy; provide a non-market reform to a slowing planned economy; jump-start the intensive growth of the economy by making each worker more productive. As Zhivkov stated at the December 1972 plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), there was also a utopian promise: ‘the further development of the scientific-technical revolution, the wide usage of automated systems and other means of cybernitisation and automation…[will determine] the gradual and consecutive transfer of production functions from Man to the technical means’.Footnote 28
First Contact and First UNIDO Mission in Bulgaria (1966–8)
Détente’s economic dimensions were a boon for Eastern European countries that were looking for technical aid and high technology outside the Soviet Bloc. Seen as the most loyal Soviet ally, Bulgaria struggled with bilateral agreements in the sphere, so internationalism was key.Footnote 29 Among the 33 technical assistance projects UNIDO had in Bulgaria between 1966 and the beginning of the 1980s, eight dealt with information technologies, automation and electronics industry and two concerned the Research Institute for Instrument Design (henceforth NIPKIP, from the Bulgarian abbreviation for the Scientific, Research and Design Institute for Instrument Building; Научно-изследователски и проекто-конструкторски институт по приборостроене), which played a crucial role in the development of electronics in Bulgaria.Footnote 30 As NIPKIP itself was the heart of research and design work for Bulgarian automation (creating the ‘automatic muscles’ of industry such as measurement devices, mechanisms for robotics, etc.), it is through the prism of this institute’s dealings with UNIDO that this paper will address the interaction and two-way street of Bulgarian socialism and the international organisation.
The first mention of contacts with NIPKIP in UNIDO archives occurs right after its creation in 1966, when the UNIDO Interregional Economic Adviser S. Lurié met Bulgarian officials in Geneva and organised a five-day visit to Bulgaria in September the same year to ‘determine the exact nature of the needs of assistance’.Footnote 31 A short-term mission, called ‘Special Industrial Service’ (or SIS) in UNIDO’s jargon, was established with the goals of ‘reinforcing the present staff of the institute by international experts’ and identifying the potential needs of ‘specialized equipment’.Footnote 32 The SIS mission worked in NIPKIP from March to August 1968. It was a true international team led by a West German scholar from Mainz University and comprising four more experts from Denmark, the United States and Yugoslavia. The experts made a thorough assessment of the NIPKIP facilities, unsurprisingly sometimes expressing diverging visions. Yugoslav expert Borislav S. Džodžović made a very positive assessment of the personnel and the general organisation of the institute.Footnote 33 US expert John C. McCullagh, by contrast, was more critical and found that the personnel lacked a lot of experience and that the equipment was often too heterogeneous, leading to compatibility problems. He also mentioned cleanliness and the size of the rooms as a problem.Footnote 34 All experts agreed, however, that the personnel were very young (often not longer than two years in position), that the equipment was not sufficient and that the library was not up to date.Footnote 35 Last but not least, they noticed that English was most often not spoken and stressed learning it as an absolute prerequisite to any technological transfer from Western Europe.Footnote 36
The interactions between the experts’ team and the NIPKIP leaders, with Angel Angelov as the Head of the Institute, were very good.Footnote 37 The first recorded meeting took place at the Ministry for Machine-Building in April and reportedly proceeded in a good atmosphere. UNIDO’s experts agreed with Angelov’s suggestion that NIPKIP should be ‘the key institute for the development instrument design in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria’.Footnote 38 They had already expressed the same opinion in a report before the meeting: ‘NIPKIP seems to be just the right institution. It is of the utmost importance to set up a Testing-Laboratory for Components and materials, because no such laboratory exists in the country.’Footnote 39 UNIDO’s experts and NIPKIP leaders consequently agreed that the Bulgarian government should apply for Special Fund Project resources from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The suggestion came from Angelov himself, and the experts’ team turned out to be ‘strongly in favour of that possibility’.Footnote 40 Such a task being seen as ‘out of the job description’, two experts (Džodžović and McCullagh) asked for and obtained an extension of their mission, because ‘it takes considerable time to become familiar with an institute like this and there are so many problems’.Footnote 41 Indicative of the good working atmosphere is an ‘appreciation’ from the US expert McCullagh in his final report: ‘The writer’s thanks must also be recorded to all Heads of Departments and their staff who bore his seemingly endless questions with unfailing courtesy, even when slight errors in translation made them ludicrous. Also for the time and trouble they took to see that he was correctly informed.’Footnote 42
This first mission shows how little UNIDO’s practical work was affected by the Cold War divide. Ideological issues were absent and Bulgaria was regarded as any other aid recipient country. The international character of the team sent to Sofia shows that UNIDO recruited experts from Western European countries and the United States who were willing to work in a People’s Republic. The participation of a Yugoslav expert was also a way of bridging the potential political and cultural gaps with the Bulgarian leaders.
UNIDO and the Development of NIPKIP (1969–75)
Far from being just an ad hoc assignment, this 1968 mission very early on set as a goal to prepare a longer technical assistance project funded by the UNDP. However, obtaining the UNDP’s technical assistance was a lengthy process. First, the UNDP organised its own ‘fact finding mission’ in September and October 1969, to assess NIPKIP’s application made in cooperation with UNIDO experts. That mission reduced the funding from 1.6 million to 1.1 million. Equipment devices in particular were reduced from 186 to 57.Footnote 43 A note for the file stated that the Bulgarian government ‘was very disappointed that UNDP approved only a limited first phase’, but NIPKIP Director Angelov seemed nonetheless to be satisfied ‘to start the project rather modestly’.Footnote 44 In the UNDP’s vision, the key person was the project manager.Footnote 45 Appointed for the entire duration of the project and living in Sofia, he was responsible for the implementation of the whole project. His recruitment, however, turned out to be a long process. ‘The only sources of the necessary experts’ being ‘the various private companies who [were] active in the control engineering and industrial automation field’, UNIDO faced difficulties in persuading them to ‘release well qualified experts’ more than in previous instances. This quote shows that UNIDO was especially interesting for socialist states because it could give access to private firms beyond the intergovernmental relations that were the core but also the limits of the socialist state’s international policies. At the same time, it also shows that cooperation from Western private companies was far from self-evident, not because of a potential ideological hostility but rather because this was not of interest to them. In addition, UNIDO had its own regulations that delayed the project, as a UNIDO adviser regretted: ‘The great delay inherent in following rigidly the UNIDO recruitment procedures resulted in an excellent candidate for the initial expert post being no longer available when he was finally offered the appointment. And although alternative candidates were ultimately found, at the time of writing the selected expert is still not in the field.’Footnote 46
For the position of project manager, UNIDO eventually interviewed five candidates from the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden.Footnote 47 NIPKIP’s Director Angelov was invited to establish an order of priority among them. He chose W. Ask, from Sweden, and Robert Galley, from the United States, as joint first candidates (ex aequo et bono). Both active in private companies for decades, and aged respectively 55 and 65, they might have looked for new experiences at that point in their lives, such as applying for a UNIDO mission. This indicates that in addition to state and company level, cooperation was also a matter of purely personal motivations, which UNIDO proved able to use to recruit experts. The project could eventually start in December 1970 when Galley was appointed project manager. Galley had left the US engineering company Bechtel and was probably recently retired. He seems to have been dedicated to the project, as evidenced by a letter to a friend in UNIDO in which he wrote that he was ‘very enthusiastic’ and that he and his wife were ‘enjoying life in Bulgaria at the fullest’.Footnote 48 However, tensions progressively appeared as his working style was considered too unpredictable. He finally was removed in 1973 with the reason he was ‘aloof from the technical and administrative aspects related to the implementation of the project’Footnote 49 and was replaced by UNIDO Coordinating Industrial Adviser Kurt Jenkner, who ran the project until the end in 1975.
The project manager was responsible for reporting to UNIDO and UNDP as well as for the relations with the Bulgarian government. He led a changing staff of experts who were hired for shorter terms (three to six months). Between 1970 and 1975, five short-term experts worked at NIPKIP. One came from the United States, where he had just retired from Honeywell in Minneapolis, one from the Soviet Union, two from the United Kingdom and one from Denmark. UNIDO was especially concerned with the experts’ attitude towards the Bulgarian staff. In the welcome letter sent to each of them, the newly recruited experts were encouraged to create ‘from the very start a climate of mutual confidence and understanding with the counterpart personnel’ and were reminded that they would be ‘working with people whose cultural background and way of life may differ from [their] own’, which may lead them to ‘adjust to situations as they arise’.Footnote 50 Experts from different countries seem to have worked in a good spirit. A report stated that ‘Maggs [British expert] worked very well during this project with his counterpart Mr. Russov [Soviet expert] for whom he was also able to organise a training programme for six months in England under the fellowship budget’.Footnote 51 The project manager also closely followed the modernisation of NIPKIP’s equipment, which until 1966 mainly came from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany with a few pieces from Austria, France and the United Kingdom.Footnote 52 Selected by the UNDP,Footnote 53 57 pieces of equipment were provided to NIPKIP through UNIDO, which largely renewed the existing equipment at NIPKIP at a time when the CoCom embargo was still theoretically operating. In addition to equipment, the UNDP also funded a language laboratory set up in October 1970 and a teacher who started her work in February 1971.Footnote 54
Learning English was identified as a vital need, especially when it came to fellowships, which were regarded as crucial to train new specialists for NIPKIP. However, fellowships were difficult to find. Initially planned in the United States, some fellowships were ‘overruled by the US Government who [was] not agreeable to place Bulgarian fellows in industry’.Footnote 55 But the main difficulties came from the firms themselves, which ‘may not readily welcome fellows nor be prepared to make available to them information which they might subsequently use to enable Bulgarian firms to enter into direct competition with them’.Footnote 56 Again, the reluctance came not out of an ideological hostility but rather out of a natural fear of potential rivals in a competitive market economy. Eventually, the experts themselves played a crucial role in finding fellowships, since ‘most fellows were finally placed through direct contacts with prospective host companies, made by the UNIDO experts in electrical and electronic control instruments’.Footnote 57 From 11 in 1971–2, their number increased to 27 fellowships planned in 1973–4.Footnote 58 The January 1973 Progress Report stated that a stable 6 per cent part of the NIPKIP staff was away being trained in firms in the United Kingdom (at Taylor and Advanced Instruments), West Germany (at Siemens), Denmark (at Danbridge and Risö) and Sweden (at SAAB).Footnote 59 Bulgarian staff along with UNIDO experts also visited fairs in the Eastern Bloc (Poznan Fair, Electromash in Moscow) but above all in Western Europe (Mesucora in Paris).Footnote 60 In December 1972, they travelled through Germany, Switzerland and Italy and visited a total of 29 firms, where they tried to make contacts, ask for potential fellowships or suggest cooperation.Footnote 61
UNIDO’s technical assistance was crucial for NIPKIP in several regards. It helped solve immediate practical difficulties, like language learning and equipment, which could have hindered any further initiative. In its second phase, it provided necessary contacts in Western European firms that Bulgarians were always seeking and sometimes had difficulties obtaining. Above all, it gave NIPKIP’s leaders a strategic, bird’s eye view, as stated by Project Manager Jenkner in a letter to a UNIDO official in Vienna: ‘UNIDO staff [is] composed of senior people with considerable industrial experience […] The activities of the experts thus go beyond the actual design of specific instruments and include the whole process which leads to the decision to engage in a specific development project, questions of market, needs of industry, expected production etc.’Footnote 62 One Danish expert even wrote a short study for NIPKIP on ‘Organization of Research and Development’.Footnote 63 UNIDO experts thus contributed to an acculturation process that was crucial to the building of NIPKIP.
The Development of NIPKIP and Its Changing Relationship to UNIDO (1975–80)
These efforts were part of the continued growth of Bulgarian electronics. The seventh (1975) and eighth (1980) Five Year Plans came with their own sector special programmes – Avtomatika (automation) and Elektronika (computing). A Ministry of Electronics was created in 1973, eventually merging with the Machine-Building ministry in 1981 under the name Ministry of Machine-Building and Electronics. The late 1970s automation tasks were ambitious: 180 new computer centres and 700 mini-computers with 3000 terminals for Bulgarian enterprises, which were to be heavily automated in order to increase their productivity.Footnote 64 Over 700 tasks and systems were planned to be automated, in the pursuit of intensive economic growth.Footnote 65 NIPKIP, like other institutes in automation, computing and electronics, rose to even greater prominence, as they were the nerve centres expected to produce the ‘steel muscle’ for this modernisation.
In 1977 the Bulgarian sand UNDP agreed on a new three-year project.Footnote 66 A project had been prepared in 1975, but ‘in the light of new developments’ was now considered as ‘outdated’.Footnote 67 The 1977 project set a new goal consisting of the ‘Implementation of modern automatism and process control’, stating: ‘Computer process control systems have already been successfully introduced in many industrialised countries, but this technology is new in Bulgaria and requires considerable experience before such system can be actually implemented’. Consequently, the main goal of the new project was to develop a ‘computing laboratory’ called a ‘Process Control Computer Centre’ acting ‘as an information-, consultation- and training centre for prospective and actual user industries’.Footnote 68 NIPKIP had to ‘implement now microprocessors in the different devices being developed’ and to consider ‘application of microprocessor in electronic measuring instrument[s]’, becoming a key institution in the development of automation in Bulgaria.Footnote 69 By contrast with the previous project, the objectives and the means to achieve them were thoroughly presented in a preliminary document providing information on the planned training, experts and equipment as well as a ‘work plan’ for the next three years.Footnote 70
The project’s ‘components’ stayed the same but were more systematically planned, evidenced by the charts used to create an overview of the project’s implementation. A programme of ‘exhibitions, conferences and symposia’ was set up for each year and one to six people sent to each of them for five-day stays. Among events attended were the Hannover Fair, the Stockholm Technical Fair, the International Exhibition on industrial electronics in Basel, several ‘salons’ in Paris and the Productronica Fair in Munich.Footnote 71 During their stay, the NIPKIP staff members also visited firms ‘with the aim of exploring the opportunities for purchasing licenses’.Footnote 72 The project initially planned the training of the laboratory’s director in an ‘advanced country’ (referring to the United Kingdom, France or Switzerland) for four months and the training of six staff members of the laboratory.Footnote 73 However, it seems that only the laboratory’s head as well as one staff member went abroad to be trained, in particular at CEPIA, a French firm.Footnote 74 Instead, more in-plant training was held in NIPKIP. As in the previous project, experts played a crucial role. The four experts, each hired for six months, were again difficult to find but were dedicated to their work in NIPKIP. Max Lösel, an Austrian engineer from the Fairchild company and a microprocessor consultant for UNIDO in 1978, received a particular appreciation. Thanks to him, ‘a philosophy was granted for a quick implementation of microprocessors in different projects at the Institute’.Footnote 75 He also advised the purchase of new equipment from Fairchild, a company that had already ‘activities in the Socialist countries’ and where Lösel had of course good contacts.Footnote 76 Equipment, however, was less important than in the previous project, with a cost of only 9000 dollars out of a total of more than 410,000 dollars.
This second phase was characterised by a new style in the relationship between NIPKIP and UNIDO. A major difference was that the position of project manager, previously held by a foreign expert recruited by UNIDO, was now held by NIPKIP’s director himself, A. Petrov, a sign that UNIDO trusted its Bulgarian partners but also that they had gained more autonomy. With only one person acting as director and UNIDO representative, the arrangement became easier. Petrov seems to have worked in harmony with his UNIDO counterpart in Vienna, Ernest Krajenbring, from the Industrial Operation Division, whom he casually called ‘Ernest’ in his correspondence. With a project manager from within, NIPKIP enjoyed greater autonomy. This was expressed by the fact that Petrov several times asked for a revision of the project. A review from 1979 noted that the UNDP had accepted three revisions in November 1977, August 1978 and October 1978.Footnote 77 In addition, NIPKIP could now draw on the experience gained during the first project. Although UNIDO’s help was still crucial to find adequate experts, NIPKIP’s staff members increasingly developed the Institute’s network by building direct contact with West European companies, in particular during the exhibitions and fairs they attended, or through the experts with whom they continued to maintain contact even after the end of their mission in Bulgaria.Footnote 78
Memories and NIPKIP Experts as Part of Pan-European Circuits of Exchange
NIPKIP’s international connections were thus extremely important to its existence. This could be generalised to the whole sector of electronics, automation and computing – any international cooperation was beneficial to a small state behind the CoCom embargo. Yet, UNIDO’s own archives should be read alongside the Bulgarian state ones, where high-level discussions of the industry are curiously silent about UNIDO. A search for ‘UNIDO’ turns up 385 archival documents in the Bulgarian state archives – overwhelmingly in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hardly an absence, in that sense. Yet, reading the top-level decision-making discussion from the 1960s into the 1980s – in the Politburo, Central Committee plenums and working groups and the leadership of IZOT (computer production union), PIA (Instrument-Building and Automation union) or the Committee for Scientific and Technical Progress (overarching body that set scientific and industrial policy priorities) – reveals no mention of UNIDO.
UNIDO’s first $50,000 for the building up of the Instrument Institute is in fact mentioned just once, in a January 1968 meeting of the Politburo to discuss economic relations with the European Economic Community. The party’s leadership notes approvingly the avenues available through the UN, not least their funds – already the UNDP had provided $600,000 in total to various computer-related projects.Footnote 79 The discussions note that while Bulgarian specialists did benefit from UN-related projects (UNIDO among them), the ministries they were part of paid little attention to their experience and their personal links, which could be widened in the future – in effect, Bulgarian state institutions were unaware of the international organisations’ benefits to their own specialists who were sent abroad or received training in-house through these programmes. They call on the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade to do more work with Bulgarian organisations to make them familiar with the possibilities on offer.Footnote 80 At this point, high-level discussions of UN programmes fall by the wayside.
If the high-level decision-making bodies both utilised UNIDO and kept fairly silent about it, what about the sub-state actors? Once again, UNIDO is absent from many enterprise and economic union records – the lower level of archival documents. High-placed managers in the sector, such as Kiril Boyanov, who was the head of microprocessor development in Bulgaria between the late 1960s and early 1980s, mention UNIDO in their memoirs only in passing – recalling the formation of the International Relations department of the microprocessor institute and the role of Radka Andreeva in running it, but nothing about its importance.Footnote 81 Engineers who travelled abroad as part of electronic and automation assistance to the global south, such as Koicho Dragostinov, who spent part of the late 1970s in Nigeria on such exchanges, also fail to mention UNIDO or other international programmes.Footnote 82
However, engineers who worked for NIPKIP, when asked, do give the organisation its due. An email interview with Teodora Dragoeva, an engineer who worked in NIPKIP for over two decades, sheds invaluable light into the experience of Bulgarian specialists with UNIDO and international cooperation in general. Interviews carried out for broader work on the Bulgarian electronic industry, beyond NIPKIP, support this – while UNIDO was not mentioned in interviews with specialists in Bulgaria’s computer or cybernetic institutes, references to ‘international specialisation’ and ‘cooperation’ appear periodically. Read against the official documents’ general omissions, it reveals the personal importance of such links to many who worked in the industry in Bulgaria in particular, and the socialist world in general.
Teodora Dragoeva and her late husband Dimitŭr Dragoev were two engineers at NIPKIP who met while studying electronics at VMEI-Sofia (the Higher Machine-Electrotechnical Institute/Висш машинно-електротехнически институт, the premier technical university of socialist Bulgaria) in the late 1960s.Footnote 83 As ‘in the end of the 60s electronics in Bulgaria started developing very fast and there was no problem to find work’, they quickly joined the Institute, in the section of Analogue Calculating Machines, headed by Konstantin Popov. Their very first specialisations abroad were in the Institute of Electronics in Riga (Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic), a typical example of the vast majority of specialisations available to Bulgarian specialists before the 1970s – in the socialist bloc. Dragoeva notes that they started learning of digital methods and circuits there and integrating them into their own developments.
She notes the cooperation agreement with UNIDO at the start of the 1970s and that many young specialists were sent to the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and the Netherlands for up to nine months at a time. Five went from their section (still Analogue Calculating Machines), but she couldn’t as their daughter Boryana had just been born. However, Dimitŭr Dragoev left for the United Kingdom in December 1972, spending nine months there. The first six weeks were on an accelerated English course in London, before specialising in Lanchester Polytechnic (today Coventry University) and its Electrical Engineering Department. There he specialised in hybrid calculating machines, learning methodologies of solving concrete practical tasks with differential equations. Afterwards, a further month and a half were spent on the same topics but in a Belgian institute.
After these specialisations, she notes, ‘we started developing digital systems of governance. The specializations substantially helped us in this, as well as the knowledge gained there, but the inability to get electronic elements from the second line (capitalist countries) limited us.’ Yet, they managed to create their first industrial digital controllers by 1978 – ELKON. Further specialisations followed in robotics, including in Norway and West Germany. Dimitŭr Dragoev, by this point, was heading the section of Industrial Robotics.Footnote 84 Throughout the 1980s, they designed further programmable controllers for control of discrete processes, implementing many of them in various Bulgarian enterprises, including the Instrument Building factories in Targovishte and Pravetz (where Bulgarian microcomputers were being produced).
By the mid-1980s, Dragoeva remembers, a couple of Indian engineers came ‘through the UNIDO line’, to learn about their controllers and develop similar ones back in India. In 1985, Dimitŭr Dragoev himself, together with another engineer (Ivan Adurski), was sent to Mumbai to the institute where the Indian specialists were based, in order to give lecture courses and help with further specialisations, as the institute there was trying to gear up to create programme controllers based on the ones developed by Dragoev’s team. They spent three months there and sent their report to UNIDO.Footnote 85
UNIDO does, then, figure prominently in engineers’ thoughts, and less so in managers – and is almost completely absent from the highest level of the state. Part of the reason is that NIPKIP was a major recipient of UNIDO help within Bulgaria, more so than institutes in other sectors. Yet, the absence of the programme from the highest reaches of government discussion, while present in the stories of the Dragoevs, highlights the dichotomy of the electronic industry in socialist Bulgaria. Born out of the logic of a socialist division of labour within Comecon, it was also a source of national pride for the BCP, who used it to present Bulgaria as a developed scientific-technical nation: to both its population and its socialist allies and partners in the global south. Electronic engineers in Bulgaria coveted and remembered the travel abroad that programmes such as UNIDO offered. Cutting edge professional development often lay beyond the iron curtain, while the extended trips – up to nine months – left important impressions of the ‘ideological enemy’ for citizens of a country with extremely restricted travel. Specialisations abroad were part of the privilege many in the automation sector experienced throughout the socialist bloc, allowing them to build up skills that would make their professional life after the fall of communism different to workers in other sectors, as Petrov has shown.Footnote 86 Technical assistance through UNIDO, then, contributed to the stitching together of pan-European economic and technical spaces on the level of extended professional networks even more so than on the high level. While banal, the everyday exchange of cadres in automation, who circulated across the iron curtain to posts in the United Kingdom, for example, constitute the human dimension of these spaces. UNIDO and its relation to NIPKIP stitched together a professional network of information and expertise exchange that meant engineers like the Dragoevs operated in European circuits, rather than purely communist world ones.Footnote 87
From West–East to North–South
India appears as a point of reference in the Dragoev memories. This connection to the developing world also bears out the role of NIPKIP in UNIDO’s global strategy. NIPKIP had a special place in UNIDO’s strategy as it was supposed to organise in its turn the technological transfer to developing countries. This appeared clearly in 1977 when a twinning agreement between NIPKIP and the Electronic Industries Research and Development Centre (EIRDC) based in Cairo was signed, thus realising UNIDO’s vision of an international network of institutes for electronics independent from pure market mechanisms.Footnote 88 The former NIPKIP director soon left his position in Sofia to move to Cairo as Scientific Research Director in EIRDC. Supported by UNIDO, NIPKIP set up twinning schemes with other research institutes, first in Egypt, then Algeria, Jordan and Syria in the early 1980s. UNIDO’s goal obviously was to use Bulgaria as a model for developing countries, particularly by offering training.Footnote 89
The Bulgarian government was aware of UNIDO’s strategy and took its assigned role as an opportunity, especially evident in the Indian connection. In August 1977, it took the initiative to hold a UNIDO roundtable meeting of representatives of Comecon and 20 developing countries, following a meeting in Vienna in 1976 on international industrial development cooperation.Footnote 90 Citing the Lima Conference heavily, the Indian side highlights strongly the need for exchange of information and expertise in new manufacturing sectors, even the ‘possible establishment of an information bank’ to help the developing world.Footnote 91 The meeting concludes with recommendations that the East European states should widen their cooperation efforts with the developing world, especially technical assistance in key state sectors, and – in conjunction with UNCTAD – to study multilateral systems of payments between Comecon and the developing world.Footnote 92
Secret annexes from the Indian side reveal a close reading of each East European state’s capacities for cooperation, and that on Bulgaria favourably notes that the engineering capacities of the two states were complementary. High-level meetings and visits between Indian and Bulgarian ministers in the field of industry were planned and reported on, to deepen further exchanges.Footnote 93 Electronics and automation are key areas highlighted, with a working group created in order to identify major electronic and software components ripe for joint co-production.Footnote 94 The ultimate goal was co-entry to third markets together, especially in automatic oscilloscopes and hard drives.Footnote 95 The internal Indian report on these efforts highlights that India too saw limitations to bilateral agreements, which had reached a plateau by the late 1960s; and using international agreements and forums like UN-provided ones was key to further high technology development. Key among these were placements and agreements with Eastern European specialists, Bulgarian amongst them, as they had ‘attained a fair measure of specialization in the particular product’ and proven to be interested in international cooperation and assistance.Footnote 96 Bulgarian efforts had by this point identified India’s lack of production of industrial electronics – one of NIPKIP’s specialties – and made it a priority.Footnote 97 UN programmes of technical assistance had already been highlighted in early 1970s talks of scientific exchange between the two countries, demonstrating how Bulgaria was increasingly aware how UNIDO and other such organisations could facilitate their own foreign trade priorities.Footnote 98 In effect, by the late 1970s, thus, Bulgaria was not just a recipient of UNIDO help, but facilitated meetings and used it to envision ambitious Second–Third World cooperation in automation and electronics, thus acting as a global and not only European economic actor. UNIDO was using it as part of its global strategy – a successful case of cooperation and development that could now be applied elsewhere; Bulgaria as part of its own foreign trade policy of presenting itself as a country that had overcome its industrial backwardness and was in position to be a supplier of expertise. If in the early 1970s NIPKIP was a destination for UNIDO experts who spent time in India, by the early 1980s it was a source of cadres to the global south – a thing both sides could present as a demonstration of success, for different goals.
In UNIDO’s vision, the prevailing fact was not the East–West divide but the developmental continuum between developed and developing countries. UNIDO seemed to see the Eastern Bloc countries not primarily as ‘socialist’, but rather as newly developed countries and therefore better able to serve as models for developing countries. UNIDO promoted technology transfers from West to East to accelerate transfers from North to South.
Conclusions
For the Bulgarian state, UNIDO was an important institution in such technological but also embargoed areas of Cold War science such as automation. Thus, NIPKIP – among other institutes – had official backing to use UNIDO programmes. UNIDO’s relationship with NIPKIP was a key opening for the socialist state as it sought re-entry into European technical and economic exchanges. While automation, cybernetics and computing are often seen as US-dominated fields, UNIDO’s relationship with Bulgaria complicates this view. Firstly, socialist states – especially ones seen as so ‘loyal’ to the Soviet Union as Bulgaria – were often cut out of profitable bilateral agreements, especially with the United States. Thus, international organisations for technical assistance became a key venue through which détente-era socialist states could engage in exchanges. At the same time, these international openings ‘normalised’ such technical exchanges, leading to the possibility of closer cooperation between states such as Bulgaria and individual capitalist states. But there was another aspect too – UNIDO’s technical assistance facilitated pan-European circuits. Experts who helped with automatic assistance came from Western Europe (West Germany, Austria and Scandinavia) and some from the United States. Bulgarian experts visited states such as the United Kingdom, West Germany, Switzerland, France or Denmark to specialise. Despite the ‘international’ label, UNIDO and other organisations thus operated primarily as European circuits of technical exchange across the iron curtain, re-creating a common economic European space through the everyday circulation of professionals and their expertise.
What made the relationship between NIPKIP and UNIDO so fruitful was the common belief in planning. Although UNIDO officials encouraged the experts it recruited to make NIPKIP staff acquainted with market economies mechanisms, they also questioned market principles and from time to time expressed their philosophy. When the Danish expert suggested NIPKIP ‘could perhaps subcontract some of their work’, the UNIDO official in Vienna answered, ‘It is outside the immediate objective of the technical assistance being offered by UNIDO whose aim was to build up the Bulgarian know-how in carrying out this work’, reasserting economies’ national framework.Footnote 99 When the same expert criticised that Bulgaria started ‘production of specialised components on a non-economical basis’, the same UNIDO official distinguished two approaches, either ‘related to market’ or ‘related to the establishment of closer working relationships between design institutes’, thus stressing the opposition between a market approach and an approach in terms of international cooperation. By planning this transfer of technology between Western and Eastern Europe, UNIDO de facto contributed to a pan-European economic space. In addition, with its belief in planning as a relevant tool and its pan-European level of action, UNIDO was in tune with the UN Economic Commission for Europe, which had initially supported economic planning at a European level.Footnote 100
At the same time, UNIDO’s scope of action went clearly beyond Europe. Planning visions also influenced its action towards developing countries it was supposed to serve in first place. NIPKIP became a success story of West–East transfer that could then be utilised in both UNIDO’s global strategy of North–South transfer and Bulgaria’s own push to widen assistance and trade in high technology with states such as India or Egypt. As demonstrated in the section on Memories and NIPKIP Experts as Part of Pan-European Circuits of Exchange, the UNIDO-facilitated pan-European circuit that NIPKIP was plugged into, was then widened to the whole world – Bulgaria was a stopgap waystation to development in the global south and also mutated from a site of development to a source of development expertise for other automation centres in the world. UNIDO’s plans for NIPKIP thus show a way the Second World became a lab, and an advertising space, for ‘Third’ World development.
Ironically, UNIDO’s help had to be minimised in both official proclamations about the achievements of socialist automation, and even high-level discussions in the Politburo itself. The real pan-European economic exchange was thus obfuscated at the highest level discussions, to serve the motto of ‘socialist international cooperation’. At the same time, the active participation of NIPKIP experts in UNIDO programmes, especially the importance of Western European visits and specialisations, revealed by the Dragoevs’ interviews, shows that this exchange existed at a wide level and was extremely important in the professional advancement but also personal narratives of Bulgarian engineers and technicians. Juxtaposing state and sub-state sources, combined with the reading of national and international archives together, reveals a much more complex story of exchange that can be missed without a truly pan-European approach to the source base. In essence, this article used the spirit of UNIDO–NIPKIP cooperation, but in transnational history – cooperation between specialists in different areas and source bases to show how, for different reasons, UNIDO and the Bulgarian state facilitated circuits of pan-European (and then global) exchange that were stitched together by the Western and Bulgarian experts who trod them.
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