Luring the Capitalists Eastward

The drums roll and the stripper, wrapped in a floor-length cape, slinks across the stage of a gaudy nightclub in a Hungarian resort. The customers, a mixed assortment of Communists and capitalists, strain forward in their seats.

The girl begins peeling off her gloves with exquisite deliberation. Suddenly, the drums fall silent. The manager plants himself in front of the bare-armed beauty. "Dear friends!" he announces. "Those of you who have paid in forints, koruiyas and levas are cordially invited to go next door where there is an excellent dance band." Exit the Hungarians, Czechs and Bulgarians, grumbling.

The stripper continues her act. Off go the cape, the stockings, the dress. Just as she is unhooking her bra the manager reappears. "I'm sorry to tell our beloved guests who have paid in lei and zlotys that we must now part. But next door there is a splendid restaurant with a gypsy orchestra." Now the club is awash with indignation. The manager did not mention rubles, but at one table a group of tourists protests furiously in Russian. And sure enough, they too must go, together with their Rumanian and Polish comrades. Only the bearers of hard currency--the Americans, West Germans and Scandinavians --are left to savor the unsocialist realism of a socialist bird in the buff.

This scene, from a Hungarian movie that is the smash hit of 1969, is a none-too-subtle comment on the almost manic efforts of East Europe's Communist countries to tempt Western tourists to spend their money on decadent diversions and luxuries, and at the same time keep their own people uncontaminated. Thus, at Hungary's Lake Balaton, and along Poland's Baltic coast and Rumania's and Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, congeries of resplendent grand hotels for Western tourists have sprung up, together with strip joints, gambling casinos, discotheques, nude beaches and hard-currency shops (Scotch sells for about $5 a quart).

Among all the hard-currency-hungry countries in the East bloc, Bulgaria has taken what is relatively the most ambitious plunge into international tourism. This small, underdeveloped nation of 8,000,000 people is being visited this year by 2,000,000 tourists. The polyglot invasion has put a fearful strain on the tempers of Bulgarians and Westerners alike. The development of service industries has not at all kept pace with the construction of impressive modern hotels, and there exist scarcely any trained hotel managers, waiters, maids, plumbers or telephone operators. Nor are there linguists who might cope with the babel of tongues, each clamoring for some service or other, complaining about a foul-up in reservations or a perpetual drip in their toilet tanks. Under this assault, the pretty girls behind the desks at Balkantourist habitually wear an expression of absolute vacuity, compounded of helplessness and desperation.

Dry Rot. What is more, the barriers between Bulgarians and bourgeois foreigners are beginning to tumble. As the most repressive and Sovietized state in the East bloc, Bulgaria is considered to be the only truly "safe" vacationland for Soviet and East German citizens, who are rarely allowed to travel to the West. At the Golden Sands and other Black Sea resorts, these tourists are kept segregated in hotels with names like Moskva and Berlin. But such isolation has proved ineffective, partly because hotels for Easterners and Westerners are often identical. One night this summer, an English tourist, shnoggered on the delicious and potent local slivova, meandered into the wrong hotel, opened the door of room 220 with his own key and flopped into bed with a large and compliant Russian lady.

The beach, too, offers opportunities for various kinds of East-West relationships. German families, dispersed in a divided Germany, have tearful reunions on the golden sands. Polish black-marketeers, who drive down to Bulgaria every summer loaded with sheepskins, do a brisk seaside business with West Europeans. And everyone--capitalist or Communist--can now refresh themselves with Kaba Kara under the brilliant Bulgarian sun. Once regarded in the Communist world as the very symbol of American and capitalist decadence. Coca-Cola is now bottled in Bulgaria under U.S. license.

A Blighted Coast. Western influence has set in, and not only in Bulgaria. Perched all day on the rocks overlooking the beaches reserved for overseas nudists in Rumania, the natives happily ogle the great expanses of German and Scandinavian flesh stretched out below. In discotheques all along the Black Sea coast, local girls dancing with tourists to Kama Sutra's record of Didn't Want to Have to Do It have been known to offer themselves for the night simply for a bottle of Ambre Solaire sun lotion.

Except in Russia and East Germany, Westerners may travel freely throughout Communist Europe. If they trouble to stray outside the tourist reservations, they meet with a warmth and welcoming generosity that is unmatched anywhere in the world. In the countryside, peasants offer to share their meal and provide a place to spend the night. This innocent unworldliness, one of the redeeming features of peoples living under Communism, is as yet unspoiled by the worst aspects of Western culture now being imported for the sake of hard currency. As a tourist attraction, it beats striptease and roulette and is surely one of the best reasons for Westerners to go East.

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