Port Plans Soviets’ First Legal Brothel

If town officials have their way, Ventspils soon will have the safest, best-run brothel on the Baltic Sea, and the only legal one in the Soviet Union.

Sailors from the 3,000 ships that dock in Ventspils each year would be able to patronize a privately owned, state-regulated hotel with registered prostitutes who pay taxes and are under medical supervision.

Prostitution “exists and we have to take it under control,” said Nikolai Bozhko, police chief in this port town of 52,000.

“We can’t be an ostrich who puts his head in the sand,” he said. “That’s the situation we were in up until now. We put our heads in the sand and said, ‘We don’t have that here.’ ”

Authorities not only know prostitutes operate in the city, Bozhko said, but where they can be found: at the Cosmos, a dimly lit place where sailors drink.

A recent evening visit to the Cosmos, on a central, tree-lined street, found it to be like many other Soviet restaurants, with a floor show featuring scantily clad women dancing to American-style pop music.

Many patrons were bleached blondes in heavy makeup, miniskirts and spiked heels. No rowdy sailors were visible.

Bozhko said the current system puts sailors in danger when they take prostitutes to “unknown places,” and the city loses a source of badly needed foreign currency.

Ventspils prostitutes charge the equivalent of $30 to $ 50 and sell the foreign currency to speculators or black-marketeers, Mayor Aivars Lembergs said. Under the council plan, the city would expect about 40% of prostitutes to register and pay some of their earnings in taxes.

“These women earn as much in a night as I earn in a month,” Lembergs said. “They earn as much in a week as the president does in a month--no, a lot more.”

The plan approved in principle by the 90-member council is designed to legalize prostitution but not to encourage it.

Prostitutes who refused to register would be subject to much more serious penalties than under current law, which Bozhko said prescribes fines of 100 rubles for a first offense and up to 300 for subsequent ones, with no jail time.

Since a dollar buys as many as 15 rubles on the black market, the fines are not much of a deterrent, Lembergs said.

In Bozhko’s vision of a state-regulated brothel, a foreign sailor would leave his ship and a taxi from the state-approved private business would take him to a cafe, where he would meet a state-approved woman who would spend the evening or night with him in a state-approved hotel.

Most police officers, doctors and political leaders in Ventspils appear to favor the plan, Bozhko said, and predicted that the Latvian government also would approve.

The republic’s “reaction has been: ‘It’s very new, very interesting,’ ” he said.

A detailed version of the proposal is being drawn up and probably will go to the republic’s Parliament in September, council secretary Daina Gasanova said.

If the idea works, it may be tried in Riga, capital of Latvia, where there was a legal brothel in the 1930s, Bozhko said. He added that Russian ports also might try it.

Ventspils has the reputation of being a seedy, polluted port where chemicals in the air have killed some greenery and children practice with gas masks in case an ammonia-loading center blows up.

The town has made strides against pollution in the last two years, however, and is restoring the buildings and narrow streets of its medieval quarter for the 700th anniversary.

Lembergs appeared undisturbed that Ventspils is becoming known for the brothel plan.

“This problem appeared in the world a lot longer than 1,000 years ago,” he said, smiling, “and, of course, not in Ventspils.”