The Communist Sexual Response

...By and large, however, the documentation is impressive: vast reams of statistics on abortion, family-law, birth-rates, and divorces...

...he has "visited every Communist country several times during the past few years...

...In Bulgaria, he attends a mammoth orgy, which he describes in conscientious fashion...

...Has he, too, been regaled with long disquisitions on economic reforms or the dangers of German revanchism...

...all with "very generous cleavages?from above you could practically see their navels...

...Has he, like so many others, ever sensed the presence of hidden microphones, tagtails and police-informers...

...So I took her upstairs," the author continues, "and, one thing leading to another and the hotel being barely heated, we found ourselves in bed...

...And lucky Julian Press, to have procured all this information for its "Library on Sex Research" (Volumne IV...

...8.50 Reviewed by ABRAHAM BRUMBERG Editor, "Problems of Communism" I am not personally acquainted with the author of this book, nor had I ever heard of him before, but I must confess that what little I know of him now has succeeded in arousing my envy...

...but she felt the need to enlighten Stafford on sexual mores in Yugoslavia...

...A few random examples: "Stalin had his personal brothel within the Kremlin walls: a flock of secretaries whom he could summon at will to his bed...

...In fact, I have long been waiting for the appearance of a study of this nature—ever since I read in John Gunther's Inside Russia Today that "Russians are a strongly sexed people," but that "petting in a parked car, in the American manner, is almost unknown...

...He chooses "a platinum blonde of reasonable authenticity," who is "only too glad to keep [him] company for the evening and for several nights following...

...Lucky Stafford...

...I cannot deny that I find the subject fascinating...

...Not unexpectedly, she sums up for him "the philosophy of sex in Communist Hungary...

...Things seemed to be somewhat dreary for the author during his brief sojourns in the USSR: no first-hand descriptions of orgies, no passionate couplings with sundry Sonias and Mashas...

...Finally, though his peripatetic activities have never taken him to Albania, Stafford managed to obtain a most detailed description of a "Festa e Dhive," or Feast of the Goats (a local version of a Black Mass), replete with bagpipe music and the initiation of a "sacrificial virgin...

...Hardly...

...But there is more to it than that...

...This should be news to the Sovietologists whose researches had led them to conclude that the man who fired the fatal shot on December 1, 1934, was not so much a disgruntled lover as a disgruntled political oppositionist...

...How much do they tell us either about a given country's sexual mores or about its political system, or about the relationship between the two...

...In Rumania, instead of being invited to the local opera, Stafford is asked to participate in a three-day conference on "sex practices, sex morals and psychological deviations" in that country, sponsored jointly by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health...

...In Czechoslovakia "women prisoners had been delivered to the tender mercies of sex maniacs and, at least in two instances, young girls . . . died in consequence of the brutal abuse...

...Still, good fortune led him into an encounter with a young Polish woman, Madame Wanda Z., who had spent three months in a Soviet nudist camp in the Crimea, and who was of course "quite happy" to give him "a full account" of her experiences and observations there...

...by "an Orwellian No-man" the author surely must have meant "unperson...

...As a matter of fact, I was not even aware that the phrase "Do you know a potato...

...and Novo Polsko should probably be Nowa Polska, if only because the letter "v" does not exist in Polish...

...Then there is his fascinating report on a Rumanian school ("not to mince words") for prostitutes, located, as one might expect, in a "former royal hunting lodge in Transylvania...

...Not only did the young lady censor "enjoy making love...

...long passages from literary works illustrating national attitudes toward women, free love, or the dolce vita (a very generous sampling of the latter...

...enjoyed wide currency in China both before and after the Communist takeover...

...Lest these graphic details lead some readers to suspect me of lewdness, let me make it clear that my envy, such as it is, does not pertain only or even mainly to the activities Stafford participated in, but also to his extraordinary professional gifts...

...After a brief exchange, "Zlata (that was the lady censor's name)" revealed her long yearning for a genuine bath, which of course could only be obtained in his hotel...

...But in spite of its occasional mistakes, I feel I can safely recommend Stafford's pioneering study to people who are not fluent in most European and Asiatic languages, and who have had relatively little exposure to Communist countries, including China and Albania...

...Take Yugoslavia, where Stafford has visited with notable regularity since 1945...

...The account of this ritual was furnished to Stafford by a Soviet engineer, an insomniac, who happened to chance upon it while strolling through the forest one balmy summer night...

...For if truth be told, I am not quite in a position to pass judgment on the author's finding's, my own experience in Eastern Europe having been considerably more circumscribed than his (interviews with officials, visits to conventional theaters and cinemas, and the like...

...There are also generalizations which surely no one would question, such as the following: Love and sex play "a very important part" in the practice of •Rumanian alienists, neurologists, and psychiatrists...

...To be sure, sources are hardly ever listed, and some of the author's more astonishing data must, I suppose, be taken on authority...

...It was because of my interest, and also because there are so few people qualified to review such a book, that I decided to report on it in these pages...

...numerous excerpts from newspapers demonstrating the gap between official attitudes and actual behavior...

...All, according to Stafford, are examples of the "ancient preoccupation with virility and the total domination of the male over female" in that country...

...Without engaging in authoritative judgments, therefore, let me simply conclude by first noting that Sexual Behavior in the Communist World does have some occasional unfortunate mistakes?e.g., intercurse should be spelled interccwre...

...Plus on voyage, plus c'est la meme chose...

...But how valuable are these observations...

...Thus it was with considerable interest that I learned, for instance, that among the charges leveled against Koce Xexe, the Albanian Communist leader executed in 1948 in the wake of an "anti-Tito" purge, was "weakening the Albanian national character," "spreading unnatural vice," and "advocating life-denying practices" (i.e., abortion...

...Now pace Stafford's assurance that he has been "particularly careful to avoid rash generalization" and "to present the evidence and let the reader make up his own mind," Sexual Behavior in the Communist World does abound in what some readers might possibly consider rash generalizations...

...Every party member in Leningrad knew that the luscious Katya was also Kirov's mistress," says Stafford...

...Who wouldn't...

...As for the role of sex in Chinese civilization, there is Lin Yutang's essay, "Sex Imagery in the Chinese Language," referred to by Stafford...

...Indeed, is there any relationship between a country's political system and its "sexual behavior...

...The instructors' first duty, Stafford tells us, was to seduce their young charges, a process that "sometimes took weeks, for they had to avoid at all costs a traumatic experience that would put the newly initiated lovelies off their future profession...

...Much as Kremlinolo-gists are able to divine the nature of the perennial power struggle in Russia from such isolated clues as, say, shifts in the order of leaders' photographs displayed on Red Square, so Stafford manages to ferret out the sexual element in a country's social system not merely from what might be called bona fide sexual information, but from other, more general, sources as well...

...Yet has Stafford's experience been in any way similar to that of his colleagues...

...For example: Hungarian women "have fewer inhibitions and a franker attitude to sex than any other females in the Communist orbit...

...The question, I suppose, that the reader must ask himself after finishing the book is: "Have I really learned anything valuable from it...

...I must admit that I would never have guessed that such an expression as " 'clouds and rain' . . . stood for sexual intercourse," or that "the very common expression 'Do you know a potato?' is clearly sexual in origin...

...These are challenging questions, and I. for one, am not prepared to say whether Stafford has answered them adequately...

...I have also been waiting for some reliable statistics on the number of privately owned cars in the USSR, but they are damnably hard to come by...

...Of 20,000 secondary school and university students recently conscripted by the Albanian government for one month's "voluntary" work in the fields, "more than 20 per cent of the girls . . . returned pregnant...

...Yugoslav men insist on marrying virgins"—a rather foolish goal, incidentally, judging by the author's information on Yugoslav sexual mores...

...as it were in flagranti...

...Besides providing spectacular female companions for Communist notables in all the East European countries, the school supplies cunning informers for the Rumanian secret police as well...

...in Bulgaria the "sexual impulse is transposed into deliberate torture for political ends...

...The jacket describes him as "a journalist fluent in most European and Asiatic languages," which alone would suffice to account for my reaction...

...On his very first day in November of that year he met "a young and friendly girl . . . dressed in a rather loud pullover," who turned out to be a censor at the central post office in Belgrade...

...Still, it is a splendid story...

...And the need apparently was shared by all of his chance acquaintances in that country on this and subsequent visits?from students of both sexes at Skopje University," to "a large company of show business celebrities" sipping slivovitz "on the terrace of the Golden Sands hotel" in Pula...

...In Hungary in 1966, Stafford is treated to a "breathtaking" view from the first-floor lounge of the Hotel Gellert: "About a dozen girls scattered in the lobby...

...Lin Yutang's essay brings up another noteworthy aspect of this volume, and that is its impressive documentation...

...On a visit to Poland, a pretty 17-year-old informs him of her hobby ?collecting men"—and then proceeds "to very expert and enthusiastic lovemaking...

...Stafford reports in his Introduction that "with the exception of China and Albania...

...I must admit that while the story of this uniquely Rumanian institution is a striking tribute to the author's prodigious field work, it does suffer from a certain lack of complete credibility...

...Or that Leonid Nikolayev, the assassin of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov, had an affair with the latter's secretary, and that it was his insane jealousy that touched off the bloody Soviet purges of the 1930s...

...Ah, lucky engineer...

...Has he, too, been forced to spend endless hours waiting for appointments that are apt to be cancelled in the last minute...

...A man of sensibility, Stafford finds himself "somehow more embarrassed than stimulated" by this "symptom of the dolce vita which the privileged still manage to lead in Communist countries," though not so much as to resist the advances of one of its more charming participants...

...and 48 "lavishly illustrated" pages -—most of them cartoons...

...One wonders precisely what the young ladies who had applied for admission had expected to do—surely not merely to serve mamaliga to Gheorgiu-Dej and Antonin Novotny...