Rosamund Johnston charts how, during the Cold War, arms production shaped interactions between different groups in communist Czechoslovakia and underlay the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

Czechoslovakia, rarely thought of as one of the Cold War's major players, 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.

In this talk, I follow the flow of commodities from the Czechoslovak provinces to the Cold War's flashpoints, excavating the role played by Czechoslovak arms in shaping global conflict in the twentieth century. Conversely, I show how global conflict shaped class configurations and gender relations on the factory floor. Rather than a top-down tale of politics and diplomacy, I focus in turns on the state's leaders, arms dealers, munitions workers, international students, and the general public to demonstrate the complex web of interactions upon which Czechoslovakia's international arms trade relied. To do so reveals both the sovereignty of Soviet "satellite" states during the Cold War and socialist internationalism's shifting forms.

Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe's Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna. She is the author of the award-winning Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in 2024. She has also written for Central European History, The Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the main editor of The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation (to be published in January 2026), and has authored one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.