Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Europe’S Little Tiger?: Reassessing Economic Transition In Slovakia Under The Mečiar Government 1993-1998, David A. Wemer

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Vladimir Mečiar, the first Prime Minister of independent Slovakia, is often criticized for his suppression of free media, political repression, and the widespread corruption of his government from 1993-1998. Mečiar has also been attacked for his economic policies, which critics suggest slowed down privatization and left Slovakia in a huge debt crisis. A closer look at macroeconomic data, however, demonstrates an impressive economic record for Mečiar, who oversaw several years of strong GDP growth, and relatively low levels of unemployment and inflation. By slowing down the privatization process, retaining control of key industries, and maintaining the social safety net, Mečiar …

The Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s.

Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the …

Pushkin And Gannibal: Ethnic Identity In Imperial Russia, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Since his untimely death in 1837, the nineteenth-century romantic writer Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin has been renowned the world over not only for his literary achievements, but also for being a paradigm of "Russianness." However, Pushkin himself was by no means a "pure" Russian. Like many of the inhabitants of the Russian empire during his time, he was borne of a veritable hodgepodge of ethnicities. The most surprising of these is his African ancestry; his great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African slave brought to Russia in the early eighteenth century. Remarkably, this same slave became the godson and close confidante …