Tales of The Flesh Trade

By Kenneth W. Banta/Prague

When the coaches of the Eintracht professional soccer team in Frankfurt, West Germany, went shopping for a top star to boost their squad's flagging performance, they first considered the usual procedure: raiding the rosters of their West European competitors. Then Eintracht's scouts decided to look east, and a powerful young Hungarian soon caught their eye. As it happened, the sports authorities in Communist Hungary were delighted to discuss trading a winning player for hard currency. After weeks of bargaining, the two sides cut a deal. Last fall Hungary's top star, Lajos Detari, 24, began playing in West Germany on a three-year contract worth $2 million.

The lucrative deal was among hundreds struck in the past few years in a booming sector of East-West trade: the hawking of East European talent to the West for cash or merchandise. Polish soccer goalies, Czechoslovak hockey forwards and East German handball coaches are only part of the business. Such athletes have been joined by thousands of other performers, ranging from the likes of renowned Czechoslovak Soprano Gabriela Benachkova, a diva at the prestigious Milan and Vienna opera houses, to Hungarian gypsy bands, Polish striptease artists, Bulgarian pop singers and Rumanian high-wire circus acts. Although the East bloc governments refuse to disclose the revenues they reap from the talent trade, Western economists estimate that contracts for 1986 alone may have amounted to $100 million. Says a Hungarian trade official: "People are one of the few commodities we can sell easily in the West."

The region's conventional exports suffer a reputation for second-rate quality: outdated electronic calculators, low-grade steel, shoddy carpeting. But the East bloc's human exports are often top of the line. Many of the most talented performers have been trained from as young as age six at rigorous state-run sports or music institutions. Other stars, circus artists among them, possess skills that are centuries-old specialties of Eastern Europe. Yet Communist governments are so hungry for hard currency to help finance growing debts to Western lenders and pay for imported products that they routinely mark down the price of their talent by one-half to one-fifth the going rate for similarly skilled performers from the West. The artists and athletes benefit by gaining a share of the hard-currency income as well as enhanced reputations and the coveted freedom to travel outside the bloc. The state benefits by taking a cut that can range from a modest 10% to a confiscatory 80%.

This talent-export system relies on the Communist authorities' monopoly over sport and culture. In the East bloc, the state controls all sports teams, sponsors philharmonic orchestras and dance troupes and even runs discos, cabarets and jazz clubs. By law, all foreign contracts must be funneled through official talent agencies, which act as impresarios cum exporters. Most of the bloc countries have two agencies, one that deals with sports and another that handles all other specialties. The agencies scout the domestic talent, promote their performers abroad, take bids from Western concerns and negotiate contracts.

Typically, the deals involve contracts of three to five years. The government often takes its percentage in the form of name-brand Western equipment needed by East bloc teams, including Head tennis rackets, Adidas running shoes and Rossignol racing skis. Even when the East bloc performers finally receive their share of the take, their governments routinely take a second cut by requiring them to exchange half or more of what is left into nonconvertible East bloc currency at unfavorable official rates.

Many Eastern exports are now high-profile performers, including Czechoslovakia's Smetana Quartet, a string ensemble that earns $5,000 a performance in Western cities. Czechoslovak Hockey Player Jaroslav Pouzar, 36, helped Canada's Edmonton Oilers win three Stanley Cup championships. Though most East bloc talents are more modestly gifted, Western clients are usually delighted with them. Says a Viennese cabaret manager who hires Polish dancers: "They are better trained than Westerners, work longer and cost less." A four-man Prague dance band called Bob's Combo belts out tunes in English, German and even Japanese aboard the Royal Caribbean cruise liner Sun Viking. The Polish five-woman ensemble Sabat was performing aboard the Achille Lauro when the Italian cruise ship was hijacked by terrorists in 1985. Nightclubs from West Berlin to Los Angeles to Kuwait are staffed with Polish and Rumanian chorus girls, strippers and "hostesses."

East bloc athletes and artists are so eager for a taste of capitalist comforts that they sometimes bribe officials in the state talent agencies to secure foreign contracts. Small though the performers' share of the fee may be, it is often enough to buy a Western automobile and finance a princely standard of living when they return home. But most who venture west seek fame as well as fortune. "In Poland I would pass my whole career almost unknown," says Polish Tenor Dariusz Walendowski, 32, an operetta singer who pays the Polish government's Pagart agency 15% of his average $500-a-performance fee at theaters throughout Austria. "I'm just beginning in Austria, but if I have talent, I can see it appreciated now, not after I'm dead."

For some performers, a contract in the West can never be more than a dream. Because the Communist Party exercises indirect control over cultural life in the bloc countries, even mild expressions of political dissent can be enough to deny sports stars as well as rock singers a passport. By the same token, mediocre talents boasting party membership often jump to the front of the line for jobs in the West. Explains a young Czechoslovak tennis player in Prague: "Here sports and culture are all part of politics."

East European performers fume over the sluggish official talent agencies, which routinely do little more than collect the state's fat share of hard- currency earnings. Says Jana Jonasova, 44, a soprano at Prague's National Theater who has lost up to 70% of her fee for West European engagements to the Czechoslovak Pragokoncert agency: "I have to pay a Western agent another 20% to do the work. If I didn't organize things myself, I would never appear outside Prague."

Those who do obtain work abroad may find it hard to adapt to Western ways. Performers accustomed to VIP treatment in the Communist system, including state-supplied physiotherapy, special housing and Black Sea vacations, are sometimes shocked by the rough-and-tumble of capitalist society, where they are expected to find and finance everything from trainers to apartments on salaries that are seldom lavish by Western standards. The sink-or-swim ethic of the Western entertainment world also comes as a surprise. Says Jonasova: "In Czechoslovakia I cannot rise as high as I would in New York, but I also cannot fall so low. Under socialism, artists are guaranteed a salary by the state, and even when they are past their prime, they are secure. It is not so easy to stay in the West."

For those reasons, and because most East bloc performers have families back home, only a handful defect to the West each year. Even so, the outflow of talent from the bloc has become so relentless that music lovers in Prague and East Berlin complain that they now hear many of their homegrown stars only on radio broadcasts from the West. Sports fans are livid. Polish journalists blame the talent drain for the failure of the country's once powerful national soccer team to reach the final rounds of the World Cup competition.

To limit the damage to national honor, most of the East bloc sports authorities have decreed that only athletes who are over 30 may go abroad and have banned the export of any potential participants in the 1988 Olympic Games. But official eyes remain firmly fixed on trade numbers rather than sports scores. Says Jaroslav Vacek, director of the Czechoslovak sports agency: "In this game we follow Western rules. That means making money. To play any other way would be stupid."