Tales of The Flesh Trade

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The region's conventional exports suffer a reputation for second-rate quality: outdated electronic calculators, low-grade steel, shoddy carpeting.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.