State-Socialist Poland

168 “Everyone dreams about leaving”:

Debates on Human Trafficking in State-Socialist Poland

Anna Dobrowolska

It is commonly assumed that during the state-socialist period in Poland the problem of human trafficking ceased to exist. Yet, at least two cases labeled as such were made public in the 1970s and 1980s, spurring vivid debates about the changing sexual mores and the role of the state in controlling migration and foreigners. This article analyzes how human trafficking was understood and debated by journalists, criminologists, and state representatives in the last two decades of state socialism. Thus, it contributes to the scholarship on human trafficking by bringing the Second World into the debates on migration and sex work after the Second World War. This article also showcases how seemingly outdated discourses of “white slavery” could be reapplied to serve the purposes of Cold War competition.

In June 1973 a young Polish woman, B., traveled to Dubai accompanied by a gentleman who had paid for her tickets and promised to find her a well-paid job. It was soon revealed that the advertised position of a personal secretary in reality implied other kinds of services—those of a sexual nature. However, B. was not put off by the kind of work she was expected to perform. In fact, as both her testimonies and police materials suggest, she had had some experience in providing sexual services to foreigners visiting Warsaw and Wrocław.1 After arriving in Dubai, she spent almost two weeks at the mansion of a man identified in police documents only as “the Sheik,” meeting him daily for sex and enjoying sunbaths, swimming, and good food. But as she stated, she “was very bored in Dubai and felt rather unwell,” so she asked her host for permission to return to Poland to “take care of her sick mother.”2 The permission was granted almost immediately, and after a couple of days B. was back home. Little did she know that soon she would become the first “victim” of human trafficking in the history of state-socialist Poland.

As it quickly turned out, she was not the only one. Eight years later the press made public a second human-trafficking affair, known as the Dziwex scandal, which was revealed in April 1981. In this second affair, the Italian Mafia arranged with employees of one of Poland’s state-owned enterprises to hire young women to work in Italian clubs as dancers and, as the media reported, to coax them into prostitution there. It was alleged that as many as fifteen hundred women had left Poland for Italy and that

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 168–193.

a majority never returned home.3 As I argue in this article, such timing was not coincidental, and the preoccupation with “trafficking in women” was one of the manifestations of the sense of moral and economic crisis of the late state-socialist period.

In the public debate, both cases were portrayed as human-trafficking affairs. Despite their similarities, the public understandings of the Dubai and Dziwex affairs differed markedly because of the disparate political and economic contexts of Poland in the early 1970s and Solidarity-era Poland a decade later. The early 1970s are remembered in Poland as a time of relative economic prosperity. Credits from Western banks enabled the Polish government to finance large-scale modernization projects and to supply the market with long-awaited consumer goods such as Coca-Cola. In contrast, the 1980s were a time of crisis. Mounting liabilities to the same Western creditors contributed to a deteriorating economic situation. As a consequence of the workers’ strikes in the summer of 1980, the first independent trade union—Solidarity—was founded and a short period of relative freedom known as the Solidarity’s Carnival began. Yet, the opposition was soon crushed when martial law was introduced on December 13, 1981. Political activists were detained, freedom of the press and free movement were further limited, and restrictions on international travel were imposed. Martial law remained in place until July 1983, but a growing sense of disillusionment with the system and reliance on the private sphere dominated until the end of the decade.4

All these political and social developments affected popular attitudes toward money, migration, and female labor. Thus, the two human-trafficking affairs serve as perfect lenses through which to view the society of statesocialist Poland in the process of social and economic transformation. They allow me to reflect more broadly on the socialist state’s attitudes toward not only sexuality and gender but also migration and labor.5 Although more universal frameworks of human trafficking were employed as well, the Polish cases had their own, distinctive features, deeply embedded in the Cold War context. Through the analysis of such features, this article contributes to the scholarship on human trafficking by bringing the Second World into the debates on migration and sex work after the Second World War.6 Moreover, this article showcases how seemingly outdated discourses of “white slavery” could be reapplied to serve the purposes of the Cold War competition.

The Mythology of Human Trafficking

Historians of human trafficking have long recognized the problematic character of the category itself. It is deeply embedded in the abolitionist

views on prostitution, in which every instance of migration for sex work equals coercion and exploitation. Scholars such as Donna Guy and Keely Stauter-Halsted have argued that even if evidence of deception or coercion (often by family members) was evident in cases of alleged trafficking it did not justify the scale of the moral panic surrounding so-called white slavery.7 Yet, concern that women’s migration for work would lead them into “debauchery” became one of the defining features of the public debates on the topic. A framework of “white slavery” was employed by conservative intellectuals concerned about their nations’ futures and by early feminist activists who fought against moral double standards and campaigned for the total abolition of regulated prostitution claiming it was the root of all evil.8 They all largely ignored the role women’s poverty and vulnerable position in the labor market may have played in their decisions to engage in migratory prostitution.9 Such approaches contributed to a peculiar understanding of women’s agency. According to Magaly Rodríguez García, who analyzed the proceedings of the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic of Women and Children, politicians and activists failed to distinguish between exploitative labor conditions and actual trafficking. As a result, women were denied all agency in “white slavery” discourses except “when they decided to leave prostitution.”10

The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by a growing preoccupation with the problem of population control in modern western states. Many scholars have thus argued that sex trafficking should be understood primarily as a migration problem.11 In her analysis of early-twentiethcentury conversations on population control and human trafficking, Julia Laite concludes that the key purpose of “white slavery” discourses was “to create a false dichotomy between the legitimate state’s control of migration and illegitimate organized crime’s control of migration.”12 Gendered understandings of labor and migration contributed to stigmatizing and discriminatory policies for traveling women, in particular sex workers. The policymakers not only ignored the distinction between voluntary and involuntary prostitution but also purposely blurred the definition of women in “danger” of falling into traffickers’ hands. All types of female migration were viewed as suspect and in need of control. Traveling women—believed to play a special role in sustaining a nation’s future—in fact posed a concern for the national community.13 Analyzing the moral panic surrounding sex work in Argentina, Guy argues that “unacceptable female sexual conduct defined the behavior of the family, the good citizen, and ultimately national or religious honor.”14

Many scholars claim that such a moral panic was fueled by racial prejudices. The language of “anti–white slavery” campaigns stressed the importance of protecting “our” (i.e., white) women from exploitation by men

of other races.15 Moreover, the campaigns’ focus on oriental licentiousness reinforced colonial hierarchies and incorporated the story of human trafficking into the wider civilizational discourse.16 As Elisa Camiscioli points out in regard to France, even though in police records sex traffickers were identified primarily among “white metropolitan Frenchmen,” the popular press published racialized accounts that presented procurers as Jews, Italians, or men of color.17 Such language fueled the public outrage at the existence of the “traffic in white women” and also justified actions taken by national governments to protect women deemed by society as vulnerable. Yet, the role of this racialized language was also to narrate wider societal anxieties.

According to Stauter-Halsted, in the late nineteenth-century Polish lands “the increase in public concern about trafficking had its roots in a much broader set of fears related to gender roles, female sexuality, and the behavior of single women.”18 Therefore, she argues, such discourses should be treated not as a reflection of actual events but rather as a metaphor or mythology.19 A similar approach was proposed by Jo Doezema, who wrote of the “myth of trafficking in women” in the context of the late twentiethcentury reemergence of “white slavery” discourses.20 Following these approaches, in my study of late state-socialist cases of migratory sex work, I focus on the way human trafficking was understood and constructed in the public debate to reestablish national identities and narrate processes of social transformations of postwar Polish society.

All the above mentioned themes—race, migration control, tensions surrounding women’s agency and labor—are visible in the sources that I analyze in this article. However, the new historical context in which they appear has not yet been fully researched in the historiography. Yet, as the growing scholarship on the history of sexuality in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) may suggest, the questions of transnational exchanges between East and West as well as within the Communist Bloc are essential to understanding the complex character of state-socialist sexualities.21 Moreover, Kateřina Lišková points out that “sexuality for socialist states was far from an insignificant private matter.”22 Therefore, a closer reading of the discussions on sex, morality, and women’s emancipation can reveal a lot about the gendered character of socialist regimes in CEE.23 State-socialist sexual histories may help us reconsider the seemingly uniform “Western” patterns of liberation as well as further complicate key concepts such as modernization or emancipation.24

Finally, the scholarship on the history of human trafficking has so far concentrated predominantly on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1949 United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others marked an interesting caesura both in international law and in the historiography of

this topic.25 The adoption of the seemingly uniform abolitionist framework, as well as the beginning of the Cold War, shifted the attention of policymakers onto different issues. As a result, very little has been written about the history of sex trafficking from 1945 to 1989, and even less about the (non) existence of this problem behind the Iron Curtain. My article, therefore, aims to bridge both of the gaps in the scholarship and to provide an insight into the debates on human trafficking in that period, as well as to analyze the actual cases of migratory sex work under state socialism.

“Trade in live goods”: Polish Expert Discourse on Human Trafficking

Polish human trafficking panics can be traced at least to the late nineteenth century, when emigration from (and within) the partitioned Polish lands reached its peak. The scale of public debates on alleged cases of “white slavery” may suggest that they should be read not only as responses to the events of actual human trafficking (which, as Stauter-Halstead argues, were rare and complex).26 The discourses created by journalists, medical doctors, lawyers, and other experts mirrored general anxieties about “national decline and alleged population depletion.”27 Most notably, fin-de-siècle debates on prostitution and trafficking in the Polish lands had a visible racist dimension. It was Polish women who were said to be trafficked to brothels in South America and the Middle East, while Jewish migration agents came to be seen as primary suspects in the campaigns against “white slavery.”28 Yet, the Polish expert discourse on the topic was not simply a translation of similar debates taking place in Western Europe. Polish criminology developed its own language for speaking about the cases of human trafficking, which were referred to as the “trade in live goods” (handel żywym towarem). This legacy influenced the understanding of this issue in Poland for decades.

Similarly, interwar Poland, a poor rural country with high unemployment, was a place where the human-trafficking market was said to flourish. The problem was very often taken up by the press and remained a recurring topic in the popular culture of that period. Public opinion, as well as international campaigns against the traffic in women and children, led the Polish government to create a separate female police unit. Founded in 1925, the Polish Women Police played a key role in introducing modern anti-trafficking measures, and as David Petruccelli has demonstrated, they enjoyed wide investigative powers that were unmatched by any other female police task force at the time.29 Petruccelli argues that the special role of the Women Police could be explained by the place that the “trade in live goods” occupied in the national imagination. In the first interwar years, he writes, “the campaign against the vice trade represented a vital step in

achieving independence, both from the historical burdens of partition and from unwanted foreign influences.”30

In Poland, cases of human trafficking had been continuously observed from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War. In this context, it becomes clear how new and peculiar the postwar situation must have seemed. In line with Marxist ideology, the Communist authorities believed the problem of prostitution and hence human trafficking to be nonexistent once the capitalist economy had been overthrown.31 Thus, the authorities and experts portrayed the ratification of the UN anti-trafficking convention in 1952 as being in line with the dominant ideology.32 The abolitionist approach to prostitution was portrayed as a logical consequence of the new economic system, and no further discussions or actions—such as the existence of dedicated female police units—were deemed necessary. It soon turned out, at least in the case of prostitution, that such an approach was delusionary and did not take into account the complex state of the postwar Polish society and economy.33 Therefore, by 1956, the Citizens’ Militia (the national police organization) needed to tackle the issue once again. However, this time it was only prostitution that the policemen were concerned about.34 As the Communist regime progressed in Poland, the shadow of human trafficking seemed to have faded away.35

Not surprisingly, policemen and criminologists in state-socialist Poland did not devote a lot of attention to the problem of human trafficking. Their main focus was prostitution. As Barbara Klich-Kluczewska demonstrates, the post-1956 system was “quasi-abolitionist.” Although on paper the UN convention had been enforced, and women who engaged in prostitution were no longer registered by officials, in reality the officers employed other methods of controlling and suppressing prostitution, such as public health regulations or alleged protection of the public order.36

Therefore, the ways in which the absence of the problem of human trafficking was explained by the same experts is even more interesting. A 1969 article by Kazimierz Matysiak, a Citizens’ Militia officer and criminologist, discussed reasons why no human-trafficking cases had been revealed in postwar Poland.37 Such a situation could be explained, he argued, by the following factors: the abolition of brothels, severe legal sanctions for procuring, lack of women’s unemployment, rigid passport controls, and the absence of private recruitment agencies.38 Some of these factors were certainly unsubstantiated (e.g., the alleged full employment of women), but Matysiak’s words should not be simply disregarded.39 His arguments reflected state institutions’ general approaches onto vice. There was certainly a grain of truth in his claim that the new political situation made it substantially more difficult for all kinds of human traffickers to operate.

Hence, one can argue that neither the new socialist morality nor the economic system contributed to the virtual nonexistence of human trafficking in postwar Poland. Rather, the situation was a result of strict control of the borders. Since human trafficking was understood solely in terms of the external movement of people, crimes of “internal” trafficking were rarely identified. The Citizens’ Militia officers labeled traffickers as simply procuring or pimping.40 The disappearance of human trafficking could therefore be attributed solely to the effective control of the borders by the Communist regime. As Dariusz Stola has explained, “An obsessive control of and systematic restrictions on international mobility were among the distinguishing features of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.”41 First, the system relied on a highly selective and restrictive passport policy. A passport served not only as a travel document but also as an exit permit, and each trip abroad had to be approved by the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service or SB).42 Moreover, the bureaucratic measures were supplemented by a strict border-protection system that made an illegal exit virtually impossible and extremely dangerous. As Stola estimated, in the 1950s no more than a dozen people managed to illegally leave the country each year.43 After the death of Stalin and the political thaw of 1956 the controls were relaxed, but the scale of migration did not rise significantly until fifteen years later.

Rising Consumerism and Global Entanglements of the 1970s

The only two human-trafficking affairs in postwar Poland originated in the 1970s—and this was certainly no coincidence. The decade saw a significant relaxation of migration restrictions, which manifested in less rigid passport policies and new possibilities of cross-border movement (such as free travel across the Polish–East German border). This situation bore a striking resemblance to that of Poland in the late nineteenth century, when opening borders and the rise in migration contributed to renowned “white slavery” panics.

In Poland in the 1970s, human trafficking was no longer interpreted only through the lens of migration panics. It was also deeply embedded with shifting understandings of individual consumption and the market economy. The first two decades of state socialism had been marked by strenuous industrialization, postwar poverty, and an economy of scarcity. As a result, social and political tensions had risen.44 In December 1970, workers went on strike because of rising prices and the state’s inability to provide basic products. Although the strikes were brutally suppressed, the popular unrest could not be ignored for long and led to changes in the

party leadership, with Edward Gierek as the new first secretary. His rise to power brought about a significant shift in economic policy, and socialist consumerism became its main focus. According to Andrzej Szczerski, “Luxury . . . acquired a strictly ideological dimension. . . . The visible signs of the regime’s accomplishments were not new hospitals or schools but imported goods in the shops and brand new automobiles in the streets.”45 Consequently, openness to the West facilitated international transfers of consumption patterns and certain practices, including sexual behavior. Polish society could finally feel part of the global phenomena that had developed in the West throughout the Global Sixties, such as popular culture and new consumer lifestyles.46

Of course, most of the international travel still took place within the Communist Bloc, but the number of short trips to the West rose as well. It was as high as half a million in 1976, compared with less than two thousand passports issued for travels outside the bloc in 1951.47 The relaxation of migration control made it easier to leave Poland, especially for tourist or work purposes. For instance, in the late 1970s, more than thirty thousand Polish engineers and other specialists worked on contracts in the Middle East.48 The number of foreigners visiting Poland grew significantly as well. The state-owned travel agency Orbis estimated that the number of tourists visiting Poland rose sixfold from 1971 to 1978.49 Interestingly, the visitors came not only from the West and the Soviet Bloc but also from so-called developing countries, primarily in North Africa and the Middle East. The growing literature on global entanglements of state-socialist countries has demonstrated that various forms of political, scientific, and economic cooperation occurred through and beyond the Iron Curtain.50 As this article argues, these encounters had an illegal side as well.

Such transnational transfers had an impact on the sex industry of late state-socialist Poland. As the presence of foreigners on the streets of big cities increased significantly in the 1970s, the market of services offered to them expanded as well. The infrastructure improved, for instance, as new, relatively luxurious hotels were built all over the country. However, the unofficial market grew too. Examples included illegal currency exchange and a new type of sexual services offered exclusively to foreigners who could pay for them in dollars; hence the name “foreign-currency prostitution” (prostytucja dewizowa).51 The increased demand led to both expansion and diversification of the market.52 Consequently, the number of women registered by the Citizens’ Militia as prostitutes in Warsaw rose steadily throughout the 1970s, while a growing proportion of them specialized in particular “types” of clients. To name just one example, but a very telling one, those who worked for Arabs became known as arabesques.

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The fact that women identified by the officers as “foreign-currency prostitutes” received their wages in dollars (and thus could afford products inaccessible to ordinary people) made this profession increasingly popular among young women and contributed to the changing image of prostitution in the public discourse. Press and popular-culture portrayals of sex workers stressed their economic emancipation, which enabled them to fulfill consumerist desires that were unattainable by regular citizens. Women who engaged in prostitution were presented as independent, profitdriven individuals. Even the language used to describe them reflected this transformation, with terms such as “business girls” (dziewczyny biznesu) entering the dominant narratives.54 Consequently, sex workers were less often perceived as deviants in need of being saved and more frequently portrayed as successful (yet still despised) individuals who managed to realize their consumerist aspirations in the realities of a shortage economy.

“Two traffickers from Frankfurt am Main”

Of course the newly built hotels were closely observed by the SB, which could surveil foreigners there through a wide network of secret informants among hotel staff. In April 1973 one informant reported that a suspicious man of “Arab citizenship” who had repeatedly visited some of Warsaw’s hotels was allegedly interested in young blonde “girls” and wanted to talk them into becoming courtesans (nałożnice) for the sheik of Qatar.55 As a result of these reports, the SB initiated a surveillance operation code-named “Harem.” As the investigation unfolded, it turned out that in fact two men were involved in the scheme: Abdul S. (a citizen of Syria, based in Frankfurt) and Zygmunt H. (of Polish origin but holding an American passport), both of whom had visited Poland several times, supposedly for business purposes.56 During their stays in Warsaw, they targeted good-looking Polish women and offered them profitable work for the sheik of Dubai (as the investigation later made clear). Significantly, as the SB reported, Abdul and Zygmunt were only interested in fair-haired women, which can be seen as an interesting continuation of the nineteenth-century discourses on innocent blonde Polish victims of foreign traffickers.57

The character of the work the two men advertised was unclear, but most of the women became suspicious when they heard that it would not require any foreign-language skills.58 To make the scheme more convincing, Abdul unsuccessfully tried to find employees through Polservis, a state-owned agency that facilitated foreign contracts for Polish workers.59 Although the proposal may have been tempting (the traffickers offered $100 to each woman as a prepayment for passport-application purposes), the women were reluctant to accept it. Some of them refused straight away, while oth-

ers took the money but later backed out (not without interventions by their families).60 Only one woman, B., decided to accept the offer and embarked on a train to Vienna. There she met with Zygmunt, who accompanied her to Dubai, where she stayed for about ten days. She had sex with the sheik once a day, and according to her testimony, apart from that she was free to do whatever she wanted. Both the men who facilitated her trip received financial rewards; B. herself earned a thousand dollars and received several gifts.61 However, after that time, she asked for permission to return to Poland, using “her sick mother” as an excuse. As she told the police officers, the main reason why she wanted to leave was that she was bored.62

At first, it all seems rather puzzling: an SB investigation lasting almost ten months, nine volumes of files, and dozens of witnesses interviewed only to discover that one woman spent two weeks in Dubai and returned home with some money and new clothes? In her official testimony, B. neither complained about her treatment nor blamed the men who had transported her to Dubai for any abuses. As one may judge after reading her statement, the whole journey was consensual and had very little in common with human trafficking as traditionally understood, such as coercion, violence, or misinformation. Nevertheless, B.’s testimonies, together with statements from at least ten other women, served as justification for arresting Abdul and Zygmunt and charging them with a crime that had not been in judicial use for the past thirty years—human trafficking.63 As a result, the longforgotten “white slavery” discourses were revived by SB officers, lawyers, and journalists who wrote about the case.

It was not solely the charge of human trafficking that incriminated “two traffickers from Frankfurt am Main.” They were found guilty of underrating the value of Polish women. In March 1974, Krystyna Barszczewska, a prosecutor, argued:

These two traffickers from Frankfurt am Main perceived the country on the Vistula river to be cheaper than any else. They believed the Polish women are worth less than for example German and therefore they undertook a large-scale activity in our country to lure and coax young women into traveling abroad to engage in debauchery. The defendants miscalculated because only a few of them gave in to the temptation of an “easy life,” that was supposed to await them on the Persian Gulf.64

The miscreants thus had offended not only the criminal law but also the national community as a whole. Such an evaluation of their actions was made even clearer in the final verdict. The judge stressed that the punishment (Abdul and Zygmunt were sentenced to four and three years’ imprisonment, respectively) needed to be severe not only because of the

social harms caused by their activity but also because “as foreigners they chose the Polish People’s Republic as a location to recruit women . . . who they perceived to be the cheapest products.”65 I argue here that objectification and commodification of women was not a crime in its own right. But the fact that the foreigners had “priced” Polish women too low was seen as an aggravating circumstance. Neither the prosecutor nor the judge objected to such language of commodification. Instead, they reemployed it, but to “protect” national pride and integrity.

As the investigation files show, the otherness of the two traffickers was stressed numerous times through the use of words such as foreigners and visitors (even though one of them—Zygmunt—was Polish by origin). Such an attitude was undoubtedly rooted in racial prejudice, as the SB officers constantly referred to Abdul as an “Arab.” Moreover, the legacy of historical discourses on human trafficking could also be noticed. It had always been the “other,” the “foreigner” (and in the Polish context very often a “Jew”), who trafficked “our” women and sold them to brothels in faraway, oriental lands.66 Such a strategy allowed the SB to direct responsibility for any wrongdoing away from the national community and to narrate these stories according to a simple us-versus-them paradigm. An illustration of this mechanism is the fact that none of the two “foreigners’” Polish accomplices (such as hotel porters) were charged during the trial. Put more broadly, such narrative strategies of binary conflict translated well into the Cold War black-and-white discourses in which the state-socialist morality was constantly under threat from the capitalists. The affair gained publicity in the midst of the 1973 oil crisis, when Arab states proclaimed an embargo on oil export to the West following the Yom Kippur War with Israel. It is hardly a coincidence that the two traffickers came from West Germany and the United States. Thus, they were dangerous not only as criminals but also as “agents” of a foreign power.67

Such discourses illustrate the profound ambiguities hidden behind the 1970s modernization project. Gierek’s policies centered on the notion that state-socialist Poland needed to open to the West, at least to some extent, both economically and culturally.68 According to Szczerski, the import of investable goods (feasible thanks to Western credits) had less to do with new technologies than with certain “standards of civilization” represented by the “Western dream.” Such tensions can be observed in the “Harem” investigation, as this “myth of the West” was understood to be the primary reason why Polish women had been eager to accept Abdul and Zygmunt’s proposals.69 Therefore, the trial against the two traffickers was also to some extent a debate about unforeseen results of this modernization project.

According to the prosecutor, the defendants had betrayed the trust and hospitality offered to them by Polish society, and such behavior was yet

another aggravating circumstance. As Barszczewska argued, they “visited Poland allegedly for tourist and recreational purposes. They were always welcomed with Polish hospitality, which they misused.”70 The Polish state was presented as an innocent victim of the foreigners’ actions, and its fierce response to the human-trafficking scandal was an attempt to protect itself. On the one hand, the well-being of Polish citizens—symbolized by the innocent girls who did not “g[ive] in to the temptation of an ‘easy life’”—was at stake. The negative influences of the capitalist consumer culture needed to be counteracted quickly and effectively. On the other hand, the socialist state itself fell prey to this mischievous scheme. The defendants, the prosecutor argued, had abused Polish hospitality and the trust with which the Polish state had welcomed them. Thus, their behavior toward the Polish nation was rhetorically equated with the alleged sexual exploitation suffered by their victims. The charge of human trafficking served both as a means of reaffirming the national community and protecting the honor of Polish women as it had in the fin-de-siècle discourses. In the 1970s, it became a useful tool for narrating the Cold War divisions by justifying the role of the state in protecting its citizens from dangers lurking outside the Communist Bloc.

The Cold War “myth of human trafficking”

A closer look into how both the investigation and the court trial were narrated may lead us to conclude that the role played by the “trafficked women” is somehow ambiguous. On the one hand, according to the prosecutor, one can only be “coaxed” or “lured” into being trafficked; by no means does one consciously decide to travel abroad for sex work. Thus, women were presented as passive objects of men’s actions even in the cases in which (as we know from B.’s testimony) they made an informed choice to engage in this type of work. Such a discursive deprivation of agency is, as many scholars argue, a distinguishing feature of the dominant frameworks of speaking about human trafficking and “white slavery.”71 On the other hand, agency reappears when women decide to reject these proposals.72 In such instances, the sources stress their moral integrity and cleverness. This paradox of simultaneous agency and nonagency suggests that the role “trafficked women” played in these stories was largely rhetorical. Hence, in the 1974 trial, women’s experiences were relevant only to the extent that they conformed with the “mythology” of human trafficking, a framework that resulted from a combination of the fin-de-siècle “white slavery” discourses with contemporary political agendas of the Cold War period.

Similar patterns could be observed in the press reports published in major newspapers even though the court proceedings were closed to the

public.73 Most often sensational in their tone, the reports dealt with the question of agency and victimhood as well. They often reflected on the fact that the “Harem” case by no means resembled the early twentieth-century trafficking affairs. As the prominent journalist Wanda Falkowska wrote, the women who testified during the trial “had little in common with vulnerable and miserable girls who were kidnapped and transported away from Europe to Eastern harems and American brothels at the beginning of this century. The mores have changed since then and in fact they have rather loosened.”74 The penal code was outdated, and the law on human trafficking did not fit the new situation, in which trafficked women “knew very well what they wanted.”75 She questioned the very definition of human trafficking (as worded in the 1949 UN convention) and thus the thinking that it should be prosecuted regardless of a trafficked person’s consent. Falkowska’s arguments are to some extent similar to the voices of sexwork activists of today. However, she argued that the new situation was a result of loosened morals, implying that sexual services are a sign of social degeneration. Thus, she opened the floor for questioning the victimhood of the “trafficked women” rather than for a discussion on the problematic definition of human trafficking itself.

Moreover, the journalists devoted a lot of attention to the ways women reacted to the traffickers’ proposals. Just as in the court proceedings, in the press, the women who had decided to reject the traffickers’ offers were presented as intelligent, independent, or even manipulative. As one journalist observed, “At that point [the women rejected the offers] . . . our clever [nie w ciemię bite] girls knew well what was going on. As they had not planned to become courtesans, they backed out of the deal, and the agent was left in the lurch.”76 The inexplicit question asked by the journalists was whether the women were really victims of the crime or had manipulated the two men to achieve their own goals (such as economic emancipation or traveling abroad) and thus abandoned the plan when they realized what Abdul and Zygmunt were up to. “The two gentlemen became frustrated, especially because a few of the candidates had accepted advance payments, which they were not willing to give back, and the two who had decided to go concluded their journey in Vienna, where they escaped the gentlemen’s tender care.”77

The articles quoted above presented the two traffickers as ineffective, hopeless, and thus easily deceived by their victims-to-be. The journalists seemed to take great pride in the fact that “their” women had managed to make things difficult for the two “foreigners.” Thus, the rhetorical emphasis on women’s agency served as a tool for reinstating the national (and, as we have seen, racial) boundaries rather than a message about their subjectivity or emancipation. There was virtually no debate about the true motives behind these decisions, and the question of ongoing changes in sexual mores

or women’s participation in the workforce was barely touched upon. In this regard, the press debates did not differ significantly from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on “white slavery.” However, as my second case study demonstrates, the problem of women’s emancipation through sex work was much more relevant in late state socialism than the journalists and lawyers quoted above were willing to admit.

The Italian Mafia and the Trafficking of Polish Women

In April 1981, Antena, a weekly magazine with a focus on TV and radio programs and popular culture, announced that it would soon publish a sensational report on “the biggest human trafficking scandal in the history of Polish criminology.”78 As the magazine declared, the story would feature the Italian Mafia’s operations in Poland and its associations with the stateowned Zjednoczone Przedsiębiorstwa Rozrywkowe (United Entertainment Enterprises, or ZPR). From the very beginning the scandal was given a peculiar name—Dziwex affair. This wordplay itself speaks volumes about the historical context and contemporary attitudes. In Polish, dziwka is a vulgar name for a “prostitute” (comparable to the English noun “whore”), while -ex was a popular ending of company names dealing with international trade in the late state-socialist period (the majority of which were state-owned), such as Pewex. Dziwex was therefore to be understood as a public sexual-services enterprise, which was both shocking and sensational. Moreover, this nickname very well illustrated the popular attitudes toward the “trafficked” women. Even though officially they were proclaimed to be victims, in the media debates there was little room for compassion. Rather, the women were either presented as naive and themselves responsible for their situation or purposely sexualized to attract readers’ attention.

The story emerged in the spring of 1981, and the timing certainly was not accidental. As mentioned above, it was the time of the so-called Solidarity’s Carnival, between the 1980 Gdańsk Agreement and the introduction of martial law on December 13, 1981. According to Andrzej Paczkowski, “It was not so much a carnival in the sense of amusement, but rather more a time when the sanctioned rules of social life were suspended, when people challenged the existing political hierarchy.”79 Although the “carnival” was visible mostly in the sphere of political activism (with Solidarity, the independent trade union, being the most prominent example), it also had a broader impact on the public debate, as the circulation of both legal and illegal publications was unparalleled in that period. New social actors gained visibility in the public discourse, calling for changes that would have seemed unthinkable only a few months earlier, and the debate around Dziwex illustrates these new mechanisms of public discussions.

Shortly after the affair was made public, the members of one of the Solidarity branches, employees of other entertainment enterprises, wrote an open letter to the editors of Antena in which they declared that “it was undoubtedly necessary to disclose an affair of such a scale and character to the public. This was made possible because of the changes taking place in Poland after August 1980. However, this case needs to be quickly and carefully investigated. Such socially damaging cases need to be presented to society with a maximum of clarity.”80 The discussions spurred by the Dziwex affair may be understood as a part of this carnival: a call for transparency, accountability, and new public morality. This is even more evident if we consider Solidarity’s preoccupation with morality and sexuality, manifested in calls for the introduction of three-year, paid maternity leave for women (one of the Gdańsk demands) and proposals to restrict access to abortion, influenced by the Catholic Church.81 Sexuality and gender roles therefore offered a perfect field for power play between the Communist regime and the conservative opposition. The rivalry between these two moral systems was well reflected in the Dziwex debates on the state’s responsibility for the demoralization of “our” women.

As various journalists reported, the entire scheme was based on close cooperation between some employees of the ZPR and an Italian creative agency, Olivero. In the years 1977–80 two Italians allegedly managed to recruit at least fifteen hundred women from across Poland.82 The women were offered artistic contracts and employment as dancers in Italian clubs. The selection criteria were based on their appearance, in particular their height and the color of their hair, which (once again) was to be blonde, although these were not the only requirements. The two Italians were arrested in March 1981, one of the journalists wrote that “both men were quite successful in their business, collecting subsequent batches of girls according to the Italian market standards: they had to be blonde, not shorter than 168 cm and no taller than 172 cm. Their bust, waist, and hip measurements had to be appropriate, their legs adequately long, and their minds—whenever possible—not too complex.”83 This emphasis on the blondeness of the “trafficked” women can be interpreted as a reference to the historical discourses on the “traffic in live goods.” It once again enabled the commentators to narrate the story in racialized terms. Like Arabs in the previous case study, Italians were portrayed as foreigners who had attempted to buy “our” blonde (white?) girls and take them abroad by deceit. The “international” part of the scheme allowed the press to make the story much more compelling to the reader than a usual report about prostitution and procurement at home would have been.

Some of the women had left the country as tourists, while the others had received passports as ZPR employees, a fact that only exacerbated

the popular outrage after the affair was made public amid the so-called Solidarity’s Carnival.84 To fully understand the mechanism of the scam, let us turn to the state-socialist regulations on international mobility. Theoretically, to qualify for an official business passport, a Polish citizen had to be an employee of a state-owned company and receive a delegation to go abroad.85 Often, one had to demonstrate special work-related skills. At that point, cooperation between the Italian “employers” and their Polish intermediaries from the ZPR was essential. However, the qualifying criteria did not include artistic abilities: “Only appearance mattered. Qualifications played no role. Waitresses, news agents, shop assistants, hairdressers, and girls of other professions were offered contracts abroad. After a few days of a fictional training, they received fictional certificates.”86 Soon after the women arrived in Italy, shiny prospects were replaced by dire reality. Their dancing performances turned out to be just a cover-up; in fact, they were expected to entertain the night clubs’ customers in other ways. However, their testimonies regarding this matter varied significantly. Some of the women reported that they were forced (often physically) to offer sexual services. Others claimed that such work was always consensual and that if a woman did not want to engage in it, she could just sit with a client and talk him into spending money on “consumption.”87

Nevertheless, the work conditions were far from what had been advertised, and there was undoubtedly deception, a defining feature of human trafficking. Moreover, some of the women reported physical and psychological abuse as well as lasting traumatic effects. As Iwona, one of the victims, recounted in an interview, “Some of the girls were forced to prostitute themselves, not physically, but psychologically. They did not have their passports, had debts with the Italians, had to pay for food and accommodation, so they had to earn their living somehow.”88 Other testimonies confirmed that debt bondage was a popular coercion mechanism employed by the Italian traffickers. Another woman recalled that she “had to borrow money before the travel, because it would be silly to go to Italy not dressed appropriately. Afterwards, it was unthinkable to go back with all these debts. I had been telling all these stories to my family and friends—how could I go back with nothing?”89 On the one hand, the Italians forced the women to stay and “repay” their debts. On the other, the fear of being judged in their home communities prevented the women from returning to Poland when they discovered the true nature of the job. Community consumerist expectations were a potent factor influencing women’s decisions to stay in Italy.

Sexuality and Body in Late State Socialism

If only indirectly, such comments reflected the significance of socialcontrol mechanisms, which made women eager to leave Poland and then reluctant to go back. Combined with the widespread fascination with the West, it may explain why women decided to migrate and participate in this scheme even if they knew in advance about the true character of the work. Not surprisingly, when the Dziwex affair was made public, this topic was immediately taken up by journalists. Once again, the pernicious dream of traveling to the West was seen as the main reason why women would be persuaded to accept the traffickers’ proposal. One journalist characterized this attitude toward foreign travel as a “blinding mirage” that could only cause harm and misery.90 Thus, the media tried to downplay the significance of the harsh economic situation influencing decisions to migrate and engage in sex work or to present such economic motivations as misguided and naive.

Yet, such a propagandistic view of migration was contested by ordinary people, as the number of people traveling to the West in that period may suggest.91 Some of their experiences were also narrated in the official press. Jolka, one of the “trafficked” women, explained that she decided to work in Italy for two reasons: first, to raise a “tidy sum of money,” and second, to see the world.92 In the words of Basia, “everyone dreams about leaving. Because it means money. Men want the same things. But they have to slave away, do this hard work that the local people do not want. Girls are in a better position. They have their own body, it is a marketable product, you can make a lot of easy cash as long as you are young.”93 According to Basia, women’s attraction to the traffickers’ proposals was neither unusual nor a result of their particular stupidity or naiveté. Rather, leaving the country was a widespread aspiration shared by many members of the society, regardless of their gender.94

As another interviewee, Hania, put it, “Nudity, what does it mean in modern times? . . . My butt is my private property, and I do whatever I want with it.”95 Women like Basia or Hania availed themselves of the opportunities their attractive bodies opened to them and thus perceived their sexuality as simply a tool of work. The fact that everyone else dreamt of having similar chances served as an argument for recognition of their profession. In this sense, we may understand the debates about Dziwex not only as discussions on human trafficking itself but as yet another example of the new discourses on sexual services and, more broadly, on economic status and perspectives of social advancement in and beyond the state-socialist reality.

Most of the photos and other illustrations accompanying the publications featured scantily dressed women, often in frivolous positions. Nudity was prevalent, suggesting that the stories were interesting not because of

their criminal character but rather because of their sexual connotations. Such a visual language was characteristic of the late state-socialist period. In the 1980s, a growing commodification of nudity could be observed both in informal circulation (i.e., through the distribution of home-copied pornographic videotapes) and in official media or movie production.96 Some scholars have argued that this “sexplosion” (seksplozja) of the late state-socialist period had a very political origin.97 According to Izabela Kalinowska, nudity in the public sphere may have been purposely used to appease public opinion and divert people’s attention from acute social problems.98 However, as the case of Dziwex may suggest, sexualized media discourses could also offer a platform for voicing disagreement with the political reality.

Finally, the above-analyzed media discourses are remarkable for yet another reason: namely, the language employed in narrating the Dziwex story. On the one hand, it was extremely sexist and misogynistic, and this was reflected in headlines such as “Who wants a girl?,” “Long legs, short mind,” or “Blond girls for sale.” This is yet a further example of how the debates on Dziwex contributed to the objectification of women (even if in theory strongly opposing it) as well as to blaming victims instead of offenders. In the media debates, the fact that some of the women “knew very well” what the job was or even had had previous experiences of prostitution was treated as proof that they were themselves responsible for their fate.99 The media often questioned their motives and their background. There was very little space given to the possibility of a woman being a “true” victim of sexual exploitation or human trafficking (as very similar discourses were developed regarding rape survivors).100 In this sense, sexual modernization of the late state-socialist period had its downsides. As the sexual mores relaxed and sex outside marriage became more socially acceptable, the demand for women’s sexual openness rose; hence the “protection” offered by traditional social norms on female sexual behaviors diminished. In this context, sex trafficking could to some extent be narrated as a woman’s informed choice, but it also meant that the public no longer considered her a proper victim if any exploitation occurred.101

Conclusion

The scholarship on the history of sexuality has long been guided by the assumption of Central and Eastern Europe’s near-complete isolation during the Cold War.102 However, as scholars such as Łukasz Szulc and Kateřina Lišková have argued, such a notion contributes greatly to the myth of Eastern “otherness” and homogeneity and hardly explains the historical processes that took place under Communist rule.103 Szulc’s argument was based on the study of cross-border flows in gay and lesbian magazines. Yet,

as the case studies analyzed in this article may suggest, the phenomenon was much broader, and the Iron Curtain was far from sealed.

This article has argued that racialized discourses of human trafficking were reemployed in the postwar period to narrate Cold War divisions. Preoccupation with various dangers awaiting women who got “blinded” by the “Western myth” served as justification for state control over the borders and foreigners as well as for the state’s distrust of Western consumerism. As Marcin Zaremba has demonstrated, nationalist discourses were crucial for the legitimization of the Communist regime in Poland.104 In writing about Polish girls lured to the West, journalists skillfully connected finde-siècle narratives of national harm to the modern language of socialist ideology. Thus, socialist (as opposed to capitalist) morality was portrayed as a guarantee for Polish national survival and well-being. The myth of naive women “trafficked” abroad was also employed in discussions about internal political affairs. In the case of Dziwex, the state’s failure to protect Polish women was used as an argument for transparency and democratization in the public sphere as well as to illustrate the sense of economic and moral crisis in the 1980s. Therefore, one can hardly say that socialist societies dealt with the problem of sex trafficking in one certain way. Rather, there were various competing narratives situated within a particular political and social context. The mythology of human trafficking could function as a way of legitimizing the regime, but it could also easily serve as a powerful argument in the hands of its opponents.

Most importantly, “Harem” and Dziwex affairs are both stories of migrations in the era of closed borders and restrictive passport regimes. The dominant narratives on the Cold War migrations emphasize the role of political migrations and the subsequent waves of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain.105 Yet, as these case studies demonstrate, not every migration occurred simply in the East-West direction, and not all migrations took place for political reasons. Some migration decisions could be explained by a desire to explore foreign lands and experience new cultures. A rational economic calculation was also at play. Since there were no opportunities to fulfill one’s consumerist aspirations at home, people (and not only women) turned to migration in hope of a better future. Sometimes, with the same rationale, they decided to engage in sex work abroad. However, in the public discourse their motivations and experiences were too often downplayed to conform to the dominant mythology of human trafficking.

Notes

This research has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland in the “Diamentowy Grant” scheme (research funding for the years 2017–2021). The author would like to express her gratitude to Julia Laite, Phillippa Hetherington, Katherine Lebow, Klaudia Kuchno and two anonymous reviewers for all their insightful comments and recommendations which helped her develop the argument in this article. 1Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Institute for National Remembrance Archive, hereafter AIPN), Wr 053/2186 Informacje wydziału “B” KWMO we Wrocławiu za 1973 r., k. 96–96. 2AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Protokół przesłuchania świadka B. z dn. 14 września 1973, k. 112. All translations are my own. I do not reveal B.’s personal details as they were not made public during the court proceedings. 3For the whole story, see Jan Lewandowski, “Blondynki na sprzedaż,” [Blondes for sale] Ekspres Reporterów no. 1 (1982): 107-147.

4See Andrzej Paczkowski, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980–1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism in Europe, trans. Christina Manetti (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015). 5See Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence (London: The Bodley Head, 2018). 6Magdalena Grabowska, “Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism,” Signs 37, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 385–411.

7See Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 7–35; and Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 118–131. 8Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, 25–35; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” International Review of Social History 57, S20 (2012): 97–128; Petra De Vries, “’White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation: The Dutch Campaign against the Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century,” Social & Legal Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 39–60. 9See Jessica Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–113; and Rodríguez García, “League of Nations,” 124–125. 10Rodríguez García, “League of Nations,” 109. 11Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 137–138.

12Julia Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 62, no. 1 (2017): 37–65, 61. 13Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 146.

14Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, 35.

15As Petra de Vries points out, such thinking did not apply to the other, much more common situation in which it was a white man who sexually exploited a woman of color. See De Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation,” 49. 16Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis,” 54; Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 124–130.

17Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 106.

18Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 120.

19Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 121, 168.

20Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-Emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (1999): 23–50.

21See, e.g., Alana Harris, ed., The Schism of ’68: Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945–1975 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Kateřina Lišková, Natalia Jarska, and Gábor Szegedi, “Sexuality and Gender in School-Based Sex Education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s,” History of the Family, 25, no. 4 (2020): 550–575; and Lukasz Szulc, Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

22Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 31; Kristen R. Ghodsee and Kateřina Lišková, “Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism,” Filozofija i Drustvo 27, no. 3 (2016): 489–503.

23See Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 24Dan Healey, “The Sexual Revolution in the USSR: Dynamics Beneath the Ice,” in Sexual Revolutions, ed. Gert Hekma and Alain Giami (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 236–248; Dagmar Herzog, “East Germany’s Sexual Evolution,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 71–95; Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

25For more on the UN convention itself, see Sonja Dolinsek and Philippa Hetherington, “Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities in the UN Anti-Trafficking Regime, 1947–1954,” Journal of the History of International Law 21, no. 2 (2019): 212–238.

26Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 118.

27Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 138.

28Keely Stauter-Halsted, “‘A Generation of Monsters’: Jews, Prostitution, and Racial Purity in the 1892 L’viv White Slavery Trial,” Austrian History Yearbook 38, no. 2 (2007): 25–35.

29David Petruccelli, “Pimps, Prostitutes and Policewomen: The Polish Women Police and the International Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children between the World Wars,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015): 333–350.

30Petruccelli, “Pimps, Prostitutes and Policewomen,” 341. 31On different strategies of coping with the inability of putting Marxist views on prostitution into practice, see Barbara Havelková, “Blaming All Women: On Regulation of Prostitution in State Socialist Czechoslovakia,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 36, no. 1 (2016): 165–191.

32For more on the USSR position on the UN convention, see Dolinsek and Hetherington, “Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities,” 223–226. 33Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, “Unzüchtiger Realsozialismus: Prostitution in Der Volksrepublik Polen,”[The Lewd Side of Real-Existing Socialism: Prostitution in the People‘s Republic of Poland], Osteuropa 56, no. 6 (2006): 302–317; Marcin Zaremba, “Ein Abgrund von Moral- und Machtlosigkeit: Prostitution in Polen Zwischen NS- Besatzung und Entstalinisierung,” [An Abyss of Immorality and Powerlessness: Two Documents on Prostitution in Poland 1956–57] Osteuropa 56, no. 6 (2006): 318–323. 34Archiwum Główne Policji (Central Police Archives in Warsaw, hereafter AGP) 4/59, Rozkaz Komendanta Głównego Milicji Obywatelskiej z dn. 23.I.1956 nr 2/56 w sprawie wzmożenia walki z prostytucją, k. 20–25. 35For the debates on human trafficking in the intermediate postwar period, see AIPN, BU 1550/4509, Handel kobietami i dziećmi, 1948–1949. 36Klich-Kluczewska, “Unzüchtiger Realsozialismus,” 308–309. 37Kazimierz Matysiak, “Przestępstwa eksploatacji prostytucji i jej sprawcy na terenie Trójmiasta,”[The crimes of exploitation of prostitution and their offenders in the Tri-city Region] Służba MO 72, no. 3 (1969): 342–363, 345.

38Matysiak, “Przestępstwa eksploatacji,” 345–346. 39Małgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Natalia Jarska, “Gender and Labour in Post-War Communist Poland: Female Unemployment 1945–1970,” Acta Poloniae Historica 110 (2014): 49–85.

40See Matysiak, “Przestępstwa eksploatacji,” 357–363. 41Dariusz Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State: The Passport Policy of Communist Poland, 1949–1980,” East European Politics and Societies 29, no. 1 (2015): 96–119, 96.

42Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State,” 97. 43Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State,” 102. 44Marcin Zaremba, “Społeczeństwo Polskie Lat Sześćdziesiątych—Między ‘Małą Stabilizacją’ a ‘Małą Destabilizacją,’” [Polish Society in the 1960s—between ‘Little Stablization’ and ‘Little Destabilization’] in Oblicza Marca [The Faces of March] 1968, ed. Konrad Rokicki and Sławomir Stępień (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2004), 24–51. 45Andrzej Szczerski, “The Decade of Luxury: The People’s Republic of Poland and Hotels in the 1970s,” Art in Translation 3, no. 2 (2011): 179–212, 182.

46See Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2012); Małgorzata Fidelis, “The Other Marxists: Making Sense of International Student Revolts in Poland in the Global Sixties,” Zeitschrift für OstmitteleuropaForschung 62, no. 3 (2013): 425–449; Judy Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

47Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State,” 98, 112. 48Przemysław Gasztold, “Bejrut w Warszawie: Arabski Półświatek Nad Wisłą w Latach Siedemdziesiątych i Osiemdziesiątych XX Wieku,”[Beruit in Warsaw: Arab Underworld by Vistula River in the 1970s and 1980s] in Obrzeża Społeczne Komunistycznej Warszawy (1945–1989), ed. Patryk Pleskot (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2018), 31–51, 33. 49Paweł Sowiński, “Turystyka Zagraniczna w Polsce w Latach 1956–1980,” Dzieje Najnowsze 34, no. 1 (2002): 135–144, 138. 50See Kristen R. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Małgorzata Mazurek, “Polish Economists in Nehru’s India: Making Science for the Third World in an Era of de-Stalinization and Decolonization,” Slavic Review 77, no. 3 (2018): 588–610; and James Mark and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989,” Journal of Modern History 87, no. 4 (2015): 852–891. 51For the East German case, see McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism, 100–113; and Ingrid Sharp, “The Sexual Unification of Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 3 (2004): 351–353. 52Klich-Kluczewska, “Unzüchtiger Realsozialismus,” 314–315. 53Małgorzata Jarocka, “Panienki do wynajęcia,” [Ladies for Rent] Ekspres Reporterów no. 1 (1989): 109–143, 117.

54See Michał Antoniszyn and Andrzej Marek, Prostytucja w świetle badan kryminologicznych [Prostitution in the Light of Criminological Research] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, 1985). 55AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 1, Wniosek o wszczęcie sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt. “Harem” z dn. 19 maja 1973, k. 7. 56Gasztold, “Bejrut w Warszawie,” 45–49. 57See Stauter-Halsted, “‘Generation of Monsters,’” 27–28. 58AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Akt oskarżenia z dn. 20 grudnia 1973, k. 301. 59AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 1, Meldunek z dn. 23 maja 1973, k. 34–35. 60AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Akt oskarżenia z dn. 20 grudnia 1973, k. 302, 310. 61AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Protokół przesłuchania świadka B. z dn. 14 września 1973, k. 112. 62AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Protokół przesłuchania świadka B. z dn. 14 września 1973, k. 91–114. 63AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5., Akt oskarżenia z dn. 20 grudnia 1973, k. 297–298. 64AIPN BU 0204/541 t. 1, Informacja z dn. 6 lutego 1974, k. 138. 65AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 3, Notatka służbowa z dn. 8 marca 1974, k. 142. 66In this context, it is important to note the role of Istanbul as a hub for traffic in “white women” in the nineteenth century. See Stauter-Halsted, Devil’s Chain, 146; and Malte Fuhrmann, “‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata-Pera (1870–1915),” History and Anthropology 21, no. 2 (2010): 159–72.

67Zygmunt, because of his American citizenship, was suspected of being an undercover agent, and much the investigators’ attention was focused on his personal contacts and operations. See Gasztold, “Bejrut w Warszawie,” 49. 68Szczerski, “Decade of Luxury,” 193. 69AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 5, Akt oskarżenia z dn. 20 grudnia 1973, k. 300, 335. 70AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 3, Informacja z przebiegu rozprawy sądowej w sprawie krypt. “Harem” z dn. 5 marca 1974, k. 139. 71Jo Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose? Coercion, Consent, and the UN Trafficking Protocol,” Gender and Development 10, no. 1 (2002): 20–27.

72Rodríguez García, “League of Nations,” 109. 73AIPN, BU 0/204/541 t. 3, Informacja z przebiegu rozprawy sądowej z dn. 12 lutego 1974, k. 123; Informacja z przebiegu rozprawy sądowej w sprawie kryp. “Harem” z dn. 14 lutego 1974, k. 127.

74Wanda Falkowska, “Żywy towar i martwy przepis,” [Live Stock and Dead Letter] Polityka 5 (1974) 9. 75Falkowska, “Żywy towar i martwy przepis,” 9. 76Paweł Ambroziewicz, “Miłość szejka,” [Love of the Sheikh] Prawo i Życie 5 (1974): 16.

11. 77Andrzej Gass, “Szejk i dziewczyny,” [Sheikh and the Girls] Kultura 4 (1974):

78“Dziwex i mafia,” [Dziwex and Mafia] Antena 7 (April 14, 1981): 31.

79Paczkowski, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 31.

80“Oświadczenie Międzyzakładowej Komisji Koordynacyjnej NSZZ Solidarność Pracowników Zakładów Rozrywkowych,” [Statement of the Entertainment Enterprises Solidarność Trade Union Coordinating Committee] Antena, 13 (May 26, 1981), 2. 81Joanna Z. Mishtal, “How the Church Became the State: The Catholic Regime and Reproductive Rights in Socialist Poland,” in Penn and Massino, Gender Politics and Everyday Life, 133–49.

82Lewandowski, “Blondynki na sprzedaż,” 129. 83Bożena Basiewicz, “Długie nogi rozum krótki,” [Long Legs Short Mind] Nadodrze 16 (1981): 8. Basiewicz uses the term krótki rozum (literally, “short mind”) to stress the contrast between the long legs and the stupidity expected of the candidates. 84Wojciech Markiewicz, “Wyzysk człowieka przez człowieka,”[Exploitation of a Human by another Human] Życie Warszawy 128 (1981): 3.

85Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State,” 105–106. 86Krystyna Świątecka, “Panienki do wynajęcia,” [Ladies for Rent] Tygodnik Kulturalny 28 (1982): 10. 87Consumption meant buying expensive drinks in order to spend more time with a particular woman. See Basiewicz “Długie nogi rozum krótki.” 88Krzysztof Walczak, “Mafia, panienki i pieniądze: ‘Dziwex’ przed sądem,” [Mafia, Ladies and Money: ‘Dziwex’ under a Trial] Życie Warszawy 15 (1983): 3.

89Markiewicz, “Wyzysk człowieka przez człowieka.” 90Jan Śpiewak, “Do redakcji nadszedł list,” [The Editors Received a Letter] Antena 17 (June 22, 1981): 32–31, 32. 91According to Gasztold, more than eight hundred thousand passports for travel to “capitalist countries” were issued in 1980. Gasztold, “Bejrut w Warszawie,” 32.

92Jolka added that her visit to East Germany did not count as a proper foreign trip. See Markiewicz, “Wyzysk człowieka przez człowieka.”

93Basia is most likely a pseudonym. No surnames are given in the article. Mieczysław Olbromski, “Komu dziewczynkę?,” [Who Wants a Girl?] Rzeczywistość 5 (1984): 7.

94See Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, introduction to Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Bren and Neuburger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–16, 12. See also Joanna Zalewska, “Consumer Revolution in People’s Poland: Technologies in Everyday Life and the Negotiation between Custom and Fashion (1945–1980),” Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 2 (2017): 321–39.

95Olbromski, “Komu dziewczynkę?” 96Patryk Wasiak, “VCRs, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Late State Socialist Poland,” in The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe, ed. Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, and Zsuzsa Gille (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 132–161.; Karol Jachymek, “A Train to Hollywood: Porno-Chic in the Polish Cinema of the Late 1980s,” European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 3 (2018): 1–10. 97To date, there has not been a lot of research on the “eroticization” of the public sphere in late state socialism. Case studies concentrated on East Germany and Yugoslavia: Biljana Žikić, “Dissidents Liked Pretty Girls: Nudity, Pornography and Quality Press in Socialism,” Medijska Istrazivanja 16, no. 1 (2010): 53–71; Josie McLellan, “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany,” Past and Present 205, no. 1 (2009): 143–174.

98Izabela Kalinowska, “Seks, polityka i koniec PRL-u: O cielesności w polskim kinie lat osiemdziesiątych,” [Sex, Politics and the End of People’s Poland: Body in Polish Cinema of the 1980s] in Ciało i seksualność w kinie polskim, [Body and Sexuality in Polish Cinema] ed. Sebastian Jagielski and Agnieszka Morstin-Poplawska (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, 2009), 63–78, 73.

99Małgorzata Piasecka, “Dziewczyny na eksport,” [Girls for Export] Sprawy i Ludzie 1 (1983): 1.

100For more on sexual violence and its discursive justifications, see Agnieszka Kościańska, “Gender on Trial: Changes in Legal and Discursive Practices Concerning Sexual Violence in Poland from the 1970s to the Present,” Ethnologia Europaea 50, no. 1 (2020): 111–127.

101See De Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation,” 54–56. 102See Gert Hekma and Alain Giami, “Sexual Revolutions: An Introduction,” in Hekma and Giami, Sexual Revolutions, 1–24.

103Szulc, Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland, 5–7; Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style, 2–4.

104Marcin Zaremba, Communism—Legitimacy—Nationalism : Nationalist Legitimization of the Communist Regime in Poland (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019).

105See, for example, Anna Mazurkiewicz, ed., East Central European Migrations during the Cold War: A Handbook (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019).