PERSPECTIVE ON PRIVACY : Not Our Business Who Sleeps Where : This prying into a politician’s boudoir is uncomfortably similar to Stalinist practices that Americans abhorred.

American journalists are all in a tizzy over the supposed adulteries of some politician. Pourquoi? as we say in Poland. Every serious national news reporter and columnist in Warsaw has the names and phone numbers of the lovers of many Polish politicos. The numbers are indispensable: Late in the evening this might be the only way to get a quick reaction on some pressing topic. Also, knowing the common-law-wife, concubine or lover helps in gaining informal access to this official. But discuss such relationships in public? This would not stand.

Democracy is still a relatively new thing in my country, but I hope we will never care about the intimate lives of candidates for public office as long as their intimate lives do not impede their public behavior.

In Poland’s presidential election of 1990, the press never raised this subject, although at least one of the candidates was known to have relations with a woman who was not his wife. The media were equally indifferent to the population of the beds of some of the candidates of both sexes in the 1989 parliamentary elections (both on the Solidarity ticket and from the Communist camp).

Nor does the fact that Lech Walesa has nine children with his wife and is said to be faithful to her improve his public image, which is based only on his political record. Only once did an apparently sexual dimension make it onto the news: After a state visit to Great Britain, where they were guests of the Queen, our president complained to reporters that he had problems finding Danuska (the first lady) in the bed at Windsor Castle. But this was intended as a comment on the size of the royal furniture, not the condition of the presidential marriage.

Among the 10 most popular personalities in my country, half (excluding the civic ombudswoman, Ewa Letowska, and--for obvious reasons--Cardinal Jozef Glemp) are men known to have had, or still have, affairs with women to whom they are not married.

For Poles, inquiries into the private lives of people have a particularly obnoxious resonance because they reminds us of our recent past--the Stalinist investigations and totalitarian show trials. The point of both exercises is to extract a confession. The difference is that in those investigations and trials, it was Communist Party thugs who wanted a confession to what they considered political sins, whereas the “investigative” tabloids here demand a confession to what they consider sexual sins.

The parallel is not preposterous. When tapes recorded deceitfully during a private conversation are made public for a political purpose, we’re in Orwell territory. Those who wish there were cameras in the bedroom of every candidate for political office, and microphones under every pillow, will find plenty of handy tips in “1984.”

Communists tapped telephones during martial law in my country, but there, at least, a female voice informed caller and callee when communication was established that “the conversation is being monitored.” (In America, she might have added: “Have a nice day.”)

When in Poland people were detained for what they said in private conversations, American human rights advocates protested. They were right and we were grateful. Why, then, when a private conversation is publicly used against someone in the United States, is there so feeble a protest? To discuss the contents of anything obtained through such methods is to endorse such methods.

I realize, of course, that there is no moral equivalence between the use (and farcical results) of such procedures in the rough-and-tumble of democracy and their use by totalitarian regimes. (In the latter, at least, dignity is bestowed on the victims.) Still, the means by which Bill Clinton’s private life found its way into American public life seemed to me uncomfortably familiar.