Eastern Europe: Through the Curtain Under the Counter

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EASTERN EUROPE

Behind bars in Trieste last week, unable to pay fines of $31,000 each, sat two Viennese truck drivers. Their crime: trying to take coffee labeled as fertilizer into Communist Yugoslavia. The two had been engaged in what has become one of the Continent's most lucrative enterprises. The gradual easing of visa restrictions in Eastern Europe, coupled with continuing, bleak shortages under Communism, has set off an unprecedented boom in West-to-East smuggling.

The underground trade has become a significant adjunct to the $3 billion-a-year above-board trade between free and Red Europe. Austria's Interior Minister Franz Olah, whose country ranks as the No. 1 clandestine exporter, recently pleaded with his countrymen to respect the satellites' customs and currency regulations. Since April, 20 Austrians have been arrested in Czechoslovakia on smuggling charges. A Czech court convicted one Austrian couple and an accomplice of making 49 visits to Czechoslovakia to cart in, among other items, 256 nylon coats, 39 transistor radios, 42 pairs of stockings and 22 Ibs. of chocolate.

Some of the trade is also two-way: many Westerners buy up dirt-cheap satellite currency at home and smuggle it into the East to buy the satellites' few quality products, such as Hungarian salami or Prague glassware, then take them back West. But the more standard practice is for travelers from Eastern Europe to finance their trips by bringing back Western goods. Nylons from the U.S. will bring $5 or $6 in Warsaw. Professional Polish operators regularly swing far bigger deals. Gangs travel two or three times a week to the Baltic port of Gdynia, where they buy up to 100,000 ballpoint pen refills at a time from returning seamen and resell them at a profit of 300% to 400% . Similar trade flourishes in nylon blouses, sweaters, cigarettes, perfume, cosmetics, sunglasses and zippers. If the risks are high, so are the rewards: some smuggling sailors eventually retire with houses, cars and TV sets.

Communist officials have made motions to discourage the clandestine commerce. The number of Polish custom guards has been trebled, and Czech police now even dismantle entire automobiles. But it is obvious that the Red regimes do not care too much so long as a citizen does not make a career out of contraband. The maximum prison term for smuggling is 15 years, but violators rarely get anywhere near that much. Smuggling, after all, relieves some of the growing pressures in Eastern Europe for more and better consumer goods, which the satellite economies so far have proved almost incapable of providing.