The Salamizdat

The long and the short of Eastern Europe's controlled economies is that some goods are always in surplus while others are maddeningly scarce. Thus the East Germans are plenteously swaddled in curtain material but sadly lacking in fresh fruit. The Czechs boast a superfluity of fruit but their coffee and vodka are prohibitively expensive. The Soviets are awash in coffee and vodka but desperately desire well-fashioned clothes and shoes. Nearly everyone in Eastern Europe hungers for Hungarian salamis, and Hungary is piled high with them; yet many a Magyar bosom droops despairingly for want of an uplifting bra.

Left to Communist planners, the imbalances could remain uncorrected for years. But the fraternal masses themselves have found a sociably unsocialist solution that smacks of bourgeois free enterprise. Many Eastern nations now permit relatively free travel across each other's borders, and normal exchange of comradely greetings between Czechs and Hungarians, or Poles and East Germans, is increasingly accompanied by a comradely exchange of goods. As many as 35 million Eastern Europeans use their vacation trips to neighboring countries to buy, sell and barter consumer products. In the process they have created a flourishing underground consumer market--a kind of salamizdat, to rival Russia's clandestine literary samizdat.

Many Czechs, for example, seldom take a holiday elsewhere in Eastern Europe without first stocking up on home-produced articles: textiles, sunglasses and playing cards for Rumania; shirts, shoes, socks and blue jeans for the Soviet Union; fruits for East Germany; bras, corsets and panty hose for Hungary; shoes, textiles and auto parts for Bulgaria. The enterprising Czech visitor either sells the articles for local currency or barters them for liquor in Rumania, coffee, vodka, car parts and a portable color-TV set in the Soviet Union, salami in Hungary, and curtain material in East Germany--all of which he either keeps or resells back home in Prague for three to five times his original investment.

Likewise, Poles visiting Bulgaria dispose of Polish raincoats, watches and small manufactured items; while there, they stock up on sheepskin coats and rose-petal oil, which move fast on the streets back in Warsaw or Lodz. East Europeans who visit the Soviet Union commonly report, as does one Pole: "The Russians are literally willing to buy the shirt off your back." Poles, Czechs and East Germans return freighted with Russian cameras and fur caps for the local market. Vacationing Hungarians find that their most reliable moneymaker is their salami.

Technically, most such trade is illegal for citizens of the socialist East. But since interbloc travel restrictions have been eased in recent years, customs officials are becoming more tolerant of small-time smuggling. "When the East Germans couldn't get visas to Czechoslovakia, the German border guards would shake a Czech down to his socks," says a Prague businessman. "But once they opened the border for the East Germans, the guards relaxed. They figured their own people were getting goods, so they let us get things we wanted." Shortly after the East German-Polish border was opened last Jan. 1, officials in Warsaw were complaining that Germans had bought up all the refrigerators in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec. Today, squadrons of East Germans charge across the Polish border in their Wartburgs to tank up on relatively cheap Polish gasoline. A Czech says of his winter skiing trips to the Tatra mountains: "It is not coincidental that we chose the Tatras, which are on the border between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Nor is it an accident that the packs on our backs, which our wives made, were larger than you can buy in any store. Czech furs take up a lot of room. We also carry nylon and small antiques. Those crazy Poles in Zakopane! They almost tore open our packs to trade with us."

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