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Chemical Engineer George L. Standart – between Science and Ideology

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  • Věra Dvořáčková
Věra Dvořáčková
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Gabčíkova 2362/10, Praha 8, 182 00, Czech Republic
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-3063

Published 2025-01-09

Keywords

  • George L. Standart,
  • Science in communist regime,
  • history of chemical engineering,
  • political emigration West-to-East

How to Cite

Dvořáčková, V. (2025). Chemical Engineer George L. Standart – between Science and Ideology. Substantia. https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-3063

Copyright (c) 2025 Věra Dvořáčková

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

George L. Standart was one of the few western scientists who decided to emigrate to communist Czechoslovakia. He was driven to do that by his leftist mindset, his conviction that there lay a more just and peaceful world behind the Iron Curtain, and also the feeling that he was at risk in his homeland, unsettled by McCarthyism. Although he was recruited as an informer first by the Soviet, and subsequently also the Czech intelligence services, they never found his work satisfactory as an agent, a situation exacerbated by his increasing academic workload. Most of all, George L. Standart was an outstanding scientist, one of the best in his discipline and at that time, who made an unexpected and unprecedented contribution to the Czechoslovak chemical sciences and their practical industrial applications.

The almost twenty years that George L. Standart and his wife spent in Prague nevertheless provides an opportunity to trace their personal and academic lives, the development of their attitudes shaped by their ideology and idealism and, partially, also the process by which the Czechoslovak security and intelligence services were established from the close of the 1940s to the late 1960s and the view they took of foreign nationals.

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