How to Hunt Dollars

It may be cold comfort to Westerners who are waging the gold war, but the Communist world has its balance-of-payments problems too. The East enjoys a small surplus in the $9 billion-a-year worth of East-West trade. But it needs much more to buy what it wants. So Russia and its satellites are up to new tricks and refurbishing old ways to earn hard Western currencies.

A new Russian agency called Lizenzintorg has the job of selling Soviet industrial patents to the West; it has sold the licensing rights for a continuous casting method to France's Schneider Steel Co. and to the U.S. Casting Corp. In recent years touring Soviet ballet and concert artists have brought home $1,500,000 from Britain alone, where Violinist David Oistrakh, Pianist Svyatoslav Richter and others command richer fees than U.S. artists. As well, every Communist nation has pawnshops known as "commission houses," which buy heirlooms from local people for soft Red money and sell them to visiting Westerners with an eye for china, jewelry or rare first editions.

This Year at Marienbad. The satellites also gain hard money through a remittance system by which a Westerner can send cash or scarce medicines to his aged grandmother in Bulgaria or buy up to 20 acres of land for his family in Poland. All of them collect hard money in the West for parcels that are delivered in the East. Poland is the leader in this mail-order trade, which is supported mostly by the 6,000,000 Polish-descended Americans and has the double purpose of sucking in hard money and keeping down local pressure for consumer goods. The 40 foreign branches of Poland's Pekao organization let outsiders order for Poland delivery to their relatives and friends. The insiders get scarce luxuries that range from Elizabeth Arden creams ($1 a jar) and Gillette Blue Blades ($5 for 100) to baby pigs ($16 for two) and Simca autos ($1,950). Pekao's take from this sanctioned black market traffic is estimated to be $40 million a year.

Since 1961, moneymaking tourism from the West has increased 40% in Bulgaria, more than 200% in Hungary. With capitalistic resourcefulness, the Communists heavily advertise their attractions in the West. Hungary bought the motels of the 1958 Brussels world's fair and set them down in four tourist towns along Lake Balaton. Bulgaria has built 78 new seaside hotels in the past decade and Rumania about 50. Most of the new Black Sea resorts smack more of Miami than of Moscow, and often practice segregation--Westerners only. While Western tourists (mostly European) at first ventured East out of curiosity, they now go for the snob appeal of a Black Sea tan, or simply for fun on the cheap. Three weeks at Czechoslovakia's elegant spas of Carlsbad or Marienbad cost Westerners $125 to $175, and a fortnight's all-expense tour from Frankfurt to Bulgaria's bikini beaches starts at $125.

Too Costly. As for Russia, it will collect close to $10 million from an expected 13,000 British and 12,000 American tourists this year. But tourists from the Continent generally prefer the satellites because Russia has relatively few beach resorts and is costly. Russia really has less need of the visitors. Whenever it wants extra dollars, it simply sells from its reserves of well over $4 billion worth of Soviet-mined gold. Sales of Red gold in the West have been averaging $200 million a year lately, a fact that ironically helps the U.S. by lessening foreign demand for American gold.

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