The Soviet Kiss, Gone But (Mostly) Not Missed
- By Amos Chapple
Men locking lips in public might be a rare event in today's Russia, but comrades kissing behind the Iron Curtain was once the height of fraternal protocol.
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Soviet dictator Josef Stalin looks unsure as pilot Valery Chkalov (right) leans in for a kiss in 1936.
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By 1937, Stalin seems to have warmed to the practice. Here, he lunges for a peck from pilot Vasily Molokov.
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Red Army soldiers kiss after victory was declared over Nazi Germany. The "socialist fraternal kiss" was reportedly an expression of equality -- upturning the ancien regime's custom of lowly subjects kissing noble hands (or feet, in ancient Rome and Persia).
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What looks like a last dance is actually a state event to welcome cosmonauts back to Earth led by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (third from left).
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Another angle of the 1962 event shows Khrushchev mid-kiss. The socialist fraternal kiss was usually reserved for the cheeks, but as enthusiasm for communist utopia began to wane, stately kisses only grew in passion.
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And no one kissed like Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, pictured (center) greeting communist heart-throb Konstantin Chernenko in Crimea in 1980.
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As Brezhnev locks lips with Nikolai Podgorny in the Kremlin in 1975, two elder statesmen (right) suffer instant demotion to third and fourth wheels.
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The Brezhnev kiss involved three kisses, usually on alternating cheeks; but the closer the ties between Soviet states, the closer wrinkled lips slid. This famous greeting between Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker in 1979 was later immortalized in a mural titled God Help Me Survive This Deadly Love.
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Mikhail Gorbachev (pictured greeting Honecker) may have ushered in a new era when he rose to lead the U.S.S.R., but the Soviet kiss was one custom that continued unchanged.
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Three years before the Berlin Wall came down, Honecker grips Gorbachev tight during the latter's state visit to East Germany in 1986.
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In the dying days of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, Soviet official Ivan Silayev grabs a last kiss as tennis champion Andrei Cherkasov dreams of a brighter future.
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This 2005 photo of Vladimir Putin being kissed by a WWII veteran is the last image we can find of a Soviet kiss being planted on official cheeks.
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But for die-hard communists like Ushangi Davitashvili, who keeps a shrine to Stalin in his garden in Tbilisi, the lip-smacking tradition continues, even if those lips have long-since turned to stone.
