The Satellites: Marxmen All

Boors may not always thrive under Communism, as Nikita Khrushchev so sadly learned—but boars do fine. So do bears, stags, hares, fallow deer, and every other Eastern European game species. As a result, scores of Western sportsmen last week were crossing the Iron Curtain for an annual shotgun wedding of East and West in which commissars pile up tourist dollars and jaded capitalist hunters bag big-game thrills.

“Royal Weekend.” All details of the satellite safari are, of course, handled by state-run tourist agencies. The payoff comes from “shooting fees”—each type of game bird or animal is assigned a price tag, which varies according to size, age and trophy value. At the end of a shoot, the tourist bureau tots up the value of game shot, and the hunter forks over. In the Koprivnica area of Yugoslavia last spring, a Düsseldorf status seeker shelled out $12,500 for a 660-lb. European brown bear. That was just a warmup; Koprivnica gamekeepers are carefully pampering an even bigger bruin for the same hunter to pot this fall—at a cost of $15,000. A run-of-the-hill red stag costs about $350 in Yugoslavia, but a Swiss hunter who was lucky—or unlucky—enough to bag a “world class” stag got socked with a $10,500 bill.

Even the birds do their bit for the classless society. On de luxe partridge and pheasant shoots on the old Habsburg preserves in northern Czechoslovakia, hunters stay in luxurious castles: black tie for dinner is de rigueur. In the mornings, hundreds of peasants fan out through the brush to drive the birds into range. Daily bags run as high as 140 birds per gun. Cost of a “royal weekend,” as Red tourist folders unashamedly put it: $400.

Between the Horns. At those prices, hunting behind the Iron Curtain demands a certain selfdiscipline. In Yugoslavia, it costs $500 just to wound a bear, while a clean miss is priced at $200. Hungarians and Rumanians are nicer about it—$50 to $100 for flubbing a shot.

Western visitors are also well advised to bone up on local folklore. In the Yugoslav mountains, a stag shoot is followed by a quaint little ceremony in which the hunter bends over with his head between the horns and tries to answer three riddles posed by the guide.

“Why does the rabbit go over the mountain?” the guide asks. “Why is a giraffe’s neck so long?” “Why is a lion’s head so big?” (Answers: “Because the mountain won’t go over the rabbit.” “So he can reach the ground to eat the grass.” “So he can’t stick it between the bars of his cage.”) For each wrong reply, the guide gets to whack the hunter on the rump with a willow branch. Smart Westerners can always retaliate with a few Red riddles of their own. One that is currently bouncing around the satellite circuit asks: “What did Aleksei Adzhubei learn when his father-in-law lost his job?” Answer: “That he married for love.”