Oldest Profession

"It is evening. The streets of Moscow are bright with lights. In the crowds you notice suddenly the face of a woman. She has an artful smile and a nonchalant manner. The woman walks slowly along the sidewalk and looks men in the eye. Later at the police station we meet Nadezhda M. She is in no way ashamed. Finally she is free, for one cannot put her in jail. There is no specific law."

--Moscow Trud

There is no specific law against prostitution in the Soviet Union or in the Soviet satellite countries, because the founders of Soviet socialism, Marx, Engels and Lenin, held that prostitution was a capitalist evil which simply could not exist in their "new system of social justice."

Faithful to the dogma of his masters, Stalin refused to recognize that prostitution flourished in the Soviet Union (he, says a recent Communist commentator, "professed the famous principle that if the facts do not conform to the thesis, it is the facts and not the thesis that are to blame--and woe to those who point out the facts"). When caught, Soviet prostitutes are sometimes sent to prison camps, but no laws or regulations exist under which the embarrassing problem can be rationally dealt with. Said Trud last February: "Are these women not breaking a basic law of Socialism, 'He who does not work does not eat,' and is it not time that steps were taken to punish these people?"

Soaring Syphilis. Trud's article, one of the rare admissions that prostitution does indeed exist under Soviet socialism, has been echoed in the satellite states. A Hungarian magazine recently asserted that there are 10,000 prostitutes in Budapest. In Poland, according to Radio Gdansk, there are 230,000 professionals. In a survey of Communism's old "ostrichlike policy," Salomon Lastik in Nowa Kultura reports that half of the prostitutes in Warsaw are below 25 years of age and of these one in three is not yet 18, proving them "a generation which has matured in the conditions of the People's Republic of Poland." Most juvenile prostitutes Lastik describes as the victims of "the prudishness of many persons emphasizing their 'socialism.' " He found that "over 80% of prostitutes were from working-class or peasant families which are pitiless for every moral slip. The unfortunate daughter is expelled from her home and her fellow workers turn against her." The syphilis rate is more than twice what it was in Poland three years ago, largely because "after the official statement that prostitution had been liquidated a number of venereal disease dispensaries closed down."

Tracking down young "gulls" (Baltic word for the trade), "glories" (Poznan's description), "artists" (in Cracow) and "debris girls" (in Warsaw, where many practice their trade in dilapidated, damaged houses), earnest Investigator Lastik found only 5% of Warsaw's prostitutes prospering, although his figures do not include "society ladies, presumptuous divorcees and widows with a nice flat and a telephone who are visited by introduction (cost of a night of love: 1,000 zlotys)." Of 310 "notorious prostitutes" interviewed, 106 were homeless. On cold and rainy nights they committed petty offenses "for the purpose of being arrested and obtaining at least a temporary roof over their heads, a warm nook and a spoonful of warm food."

Impudent Husbands. In the provinces the situation is worse. "Unfortunate women, who are homeless, covered with vermin and filth, are selling their bodies for 5 to 20 zlotys [a zloty is 25-c-]." Poverty has driven many husbands to encourage their wives to prostitute themselves, and Lastik complains of "their impudence and shamelessness" because "they are certain of immunity in Poland."

Lastik also met "society women whose husbands earned quite decent salaries, but who increased their income through prostitution." His conclusion: the prevalence of prostitution is not, as Engels maintained, due solely to social misery, but quite as much to socialist "blindness and falsehood."

Last week the Gomulka government established a new first in satellite propaganda: by releasing the long-suppressed antiprostitution film Paragraph Zero, it began a serious campaign to end past blindness and falsehood. But this was only a beginning. Advised Social Analyst Lastik: "We should concern ourselves with the moral state of our public."

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