Rule of Skin

One way of assessing the political climate in Eastern Europe is to apply what might be called the rule of skin: the extent to which a regime tolerates the exposure of female flesh often indicates the future direction of its cultural and sometimes even political policies. Thus, depending upon the varying fortunes of hard-lining and liberal factions--and the tolerance of the highly puritanical Soviets--hemlines may be permitted to rise thigh-high and then suddenly be ordered lowered. In nightclubs, breasts and bellies are alternately bared and covered up as a regime gyrates between bursts of almost Western-style liberalism and seizures of Marxist modesty.

In East Germany, as a tantalizing hint of what may be an impending cultural liberalization, Neues Deutschland, the official Communist newspaper, recently ran a waist-up picture of a nude East German girl for the first time in its 26-year history; the paper's columns are normally devoted to dreary political reporting.

By contrast, there has been a crackdown on striptease in Hungary, which had been far more permissive than East Germany. One reason for the restraint was Party Leader Janos Kadar's fear that too much emulation of Western ways might provoke the Russians, who then might interfere with Hungary's pioneering economic reforms, which feature some capitalist-style incentives. There also has been a crackdown in Rumania. For years, the Rumanians encouraged stripping as part of the country's receptivity to Western ways. But since last summer, when President Nicolae Ceausescu began a program to combat Western cultural influence, stripping has been discouraged.

In Poland, the year-old regime of

Edward Gierek is allowing a revival of home-grown striptease; the art has for years been practiced almost exclusively by imported dancers in bars catering to Western tourists. In a startling departure, the state entertainment agency recently placed an ad in the big party daily inviting attractive young Polish women of 22 or under to report to Warsaw's Palace of Culture to try out for jobs as strippers.

Polonia Exposed. Last week two of the three finalists from the Palace of Culture made their debut in a crowded bar in Warsaw's Hotel Bristol. As the music progressed from a staid rendition of Mendelssohn's Wedding March to the sexy West European hit Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus, a big-busted performer called Satana writhed her way out of a wedding dress, finally getting down to only a

G string. Next, in a variation on the wedding theme, the other dancer, a tall, athletic-looking brunette named Chiquita, peeled down to her string while wildly depicting the convulsions of her drug-addict groom, who turns her wedding night into a nightmare as he longs for a fix.

Once before, in the mid-1950s, striptease was briefly encouraged by Warsaw as an indication of liberalism. But then one stripper caused a sensation by dressing in native costume as Polonia, the symbol of the Polish nation, and stripping in three stages until her only attire was a set of chains. That supposedly symbolized Poland's captivity after its partition by the Austrians, Germans and Russians in the 19th century. But the act could also have been interpreted as a comment on Poland's fate under the Communists. A short time later, stripping was prohibited in Poland.

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