By Professor Conrad Smith
Bratislava, Slovakia – 37 miles down the Danube from Vienna – is where I’m a Fulbright lecturer, teaching media theory (in English) to journalism students at Comenius University, oldest and most prestigious in the country. The older and more prestigious Charles University in Prague, the Czech part of what used to be Czechoslovakia, has conveniently been in a different country since the 1993 “velvet divorce” that split the former Soviet state into two parts – industrialized west and agricultural east.
I like my Bratislava students. They are much like those in Laramie in their openness and lack of pretense – and, alas, share the reluctance of many at UW to participate in class discussion. Slovak students at least have a better excuse in that they did not start learning English until the first grade. In appearance and apparel, they would attract no attention on Pretzy’s Pasture. With luck, I’ll persuade one or two to study at UW.
People who were past their teens at independence in 1989 are noticeably different in appearance and, based on my small non-random sample, in outlook. The collective memory of Warsaw Pact troops crushing Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring” – his “Socialism with a human face” – is tangible. When those tanks arrived here, my Comenius University department chair had been a month studying at a German university, allowed before the invasion under relaxed travel rules but strictly forbidden after 1968.
One of my colleagues says life is both better and worse than under Communism. The freedom to travel greatly pleases her, but she says the “McDonaldization” of the country (her term) is diluting, if not destroying, the culture. Under Communisms she had to attend Catholic Mass surreptitiously lest authorities find out and fire her mother from a teaching job, but people, she said, helped each other more in those days, less self-centered about their careers. The real estate agent who found us a city-center apartment agrees. Life today is freer but moves much faster – her parents cannot believe she is so busy that she can’t call every day.
Evidence of western investment and its effects are ubiquitous. The most-watched TV news, most listened-to radio network, most widely read tabloid newspaper and largest-circulation respectable newspaper are each owned by US or European media conglomerates. US Steel owns the steel mill Stalin built in Eastern Slovakia, Volkswagen owns the former Czech carmaker Skoda, and so on.
Many of my students’ friends have left Slovakia for higher-paying jobs in England, Austria and Germany. Meanwhile, workers from Ukraine – the next country east, where average wages are a third of those here – flock to Slovakia for the higher standard of living. The European Union, of which Slovakia is a recent member, is experiencing a massive Greeley-type migration westward.
Meanwhile I’m making a quixotic effort to learn Slovak, a Slavik language spoken by fewer than five million people. Its closest cousins, Czech and Polish, are related in roughly the same way Norwegian is related to Swedish and Danish. But it’s fun to learn another language.