Hunters Behind the Curtain

Into East Europe's, shaggy capitals each day come scores of eager and secretive men from Western Europe. They are businessmen who have found that it pays to do business with the Communists. Their credentials are impeccably blue chip--Krupp, Volvo, Renault, Imperial Chemical Industries. By day, they hustle off to talk trade with ministers, plant managers and bureaucrats. By night, they cluster in the crowded bars and dining rooms of the hotels frequented mostly by foreigners: Warsaw's Bristol, Prague's Alcron, Bucharest's Athenee Palace. More than at any other time in the postwar era, Eastern Europe is a prime hunting ground for businessmen.

The hunting is getting better, though Eastern Europe still buys scarcely 4% of Western Europe's exports. Recently Austria's VOeEST sold an entire steel plant to Czechoslovakia. France's Renault signed up to build an auto assembly plant for the East Germans; in Poland, the British Motor Corp. is fighting Italy's Fiat for the contract to build an auto factory. Last week ouside Ploesti in Rumania, Illinois' Universal Oil Products prepared to break ground for a $22.5 million cracking plant--one of the biggest U.S. construction jobs ever undertaken behind the Iron Curtain.

Spice & Calories. The most successful salesmen are the least popular ones: the West Germans, whose high enthusiasm and low prices have overcome some of the postwar bitterness. To negotiate deals, West German companies send in up to a dozen men. Other Western countries also give solicitous service, sometimes dispatch salesmen born in Eastern Europe--or eminent public personalities. Recently Denmark's Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag visited Eastern Europe to sell some goods, and Britain's Lord Snowdon jetted to Prague to talk with Czech buyers at a British industrial design show there.

Fast-moving businessmen now get quicker visas at airports because the Communist countries have markedly relaxed travel restrictions this year. Once they arrive, the salesmen usually head directly for the ministries that they want to sell to; anybody from a well-known company can win a quick audience. Competition among the Westerners is so ferocious that they seldom talk with each other and prefer to socialize with their Communist customers. This leads to a lot of overeating, undersleeping and hangovers. The Easterners enjoy treating their capitalist guests to marathon meals, brassy nightclubs and the other delights of bourgeois Bolshevism. Says Guenter Friedrich, head of Depolma, a German-Polish trading company: "You have to have an enormous capacity for vodka and an endless stock of jokes--particularly political jokes and spicy ones."

Not Marx but Marks. The Eastern Europeans are adept at playing one Western company off against another, haggle endlessly over percentage points and specifications, but invariably live up to the terms of a deal and pay promptly. The real barrier to trade expansion is the East's shortage of hard money. To make up for that, Western European firms have lately begun to extend credits up to ten years and to accept partial payment in such goods as Rumanian machine tools and Czech ore. U.S. businessmen are generally much less enthusiastic and imaginative about Eastern trade, but that situation may change if--as expected--Congress next year lowers tariffs to encourage exchange by granting most-favored-nation status to those satellites that do not yet have it.

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