Red Roulette

In mellowing but still Marxist Eastern Europe, nothing has succeeded quite so well as one eminently collective enterprise: gambling. With government takes from legal wagering in the eight Comecon countries running well beyond $1 billion a year, betting is becoming one of the biggest businesses in the bloc.

Not too many years ago in these countries, gambling was outlawed because of the notion that good socialists should keep their noses to the grindstone, not the wheel. No longer. Nowadays, the comrades are increasingly addicted to ubiquitous lotteries and numbers games. They also like to take a flutter on weekly, Western-style soccer pools or at the track, where the sport of kings has jockeys in government colors riding state-owned nags. Bettors watch the morning line more closely than the party line, have made big sellers of such magazines as Hungary's Pesti Turf. So high is the gambling fever in Yugoslavia that one party wag has remarked that the state flag ought to have "two crossed croupier rakes on a green baize background."

Wagers While-U-Wait. Gambling is a state monopoly, and the house always wins. The government take is generally 50% or more of total wagers, compared with a maximum 22% in Las Vegas casinos. Grand larceny? No, just good policy, insist party bureaucrats, who never tire of showing off libraries and schools built with gambling profits (more than $133 million a year in Czechoslovakia, $300 million in Poland). They claim that gambling keeps the people happy, draws inflationary currency out of the economy, and often provides a handy way of disposing of unsold factory output as prizes.

The workers, for their part, find gambling irresistible. For a chance at a prize list worth a mere $200,000, Hungarians last year bought 326 million lottery tickets at an average 20-c- a ticket. Last week winners of the Czech Artists Trade Union lottery got free trips to the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Louvre in Paris. One Yugoslav physical culture group's lottery is offering hard-to-get Peugeots and trips to the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, plus U.S.-made exercise equipment as consolation prizes. And homeward-bound Yugoslav workers stop by sidewalk Daj-Dam ("You give--I'll give") stands for a while-U-wait wager: two dinars (16-c-) buys a sealed number that, if a winner, can pay up to $750.

Only for Visitors. Lately, the Communists have been turning to brassy, Western-style casinos. Yugoslavia pioneered the big-time play, will soon open its twelfth casino in a Slovenian mountain resort. Designed to shake valuable hard currency from travelers, they were first inspired by Italian tourists. "Italians like girls and gambling," says an executive of Putnik, the state travel agency, "so we gave them nightclubs and casinos." Briefly outraged, Yugoslavia's Communist neighbors soon began setting up their own. Locals are not allowed, but visiting rubes are welcome, even from other Red countries. "Sometimes a Czech visitor walks away from our tables with a small fortune," says a Rumanian tourist official, "and, of course, sometimes he loses his shirt and undershirt too."

Not everyone is happy about the trend. Budapest shuddered with the exposure of a private casino for party big shots at Lake Balaton, where the prizes included a nude state-airline hostess, dipped in chocolate. And not long ago a Prague newspaper complained that race tracks "seduced" Czech youth, fostered "idleness, deceit and crime." But another paper wisely bet on the party. "People today have more money than ever before," it said. "You can't blame the state for wanting a slice."

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