CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Private Loves

Love in Czechoslovakia, the Communists announced last week, is dangerously tainted by commercialism. Ever since marriage advertisements were banned from the Czech newspapers, reported Prague’s Communist Rude Pravo (Red Right), “editors keep getting letters from men as well as women complaining that now they have no chance to obtain mates . . .

When the Soviet people heard about our marriage advertisements, they were astonished that anyone could . . . offer himself in this manner. This was a capitalist practice . . .” Some of these capitalist ads, complained Rude Pravo, still got into the papers “veiled as advertisements asking for or offering to become a ‘housekeeper.’ “

Rude Pravo also deplored marriage bureaus, “used on the one hand, by doctors, directors or rich pensioners (factory owners have lost their attraction) and on the other hand by women with suitable dowries or widows with furniture.” These bureaus were still legal, but, as Rude Pravo put it, “we can’t correct everything at once.”