A Kiss is Still a Kiss

At a Moscow mall, two college students clasped hands across a table, folding their fingers over the back of each other’s hand, then did an American-style fist bump.

“It’s typical for us to greet each other this way,” said Azat Nagimov as he demonstrated the greeting with fellow 20-year-old Vanya Lyovkin.

More than three decades ago, Soviet Union General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev got a kiss on the lips from East German leader Erich Honecker. A news photograph of the moment took on a life of its own, cementing Brezhnev’s reputation as a smooching statesman, and creating a stereotype of Russian men as lip-lockers. Russian men ranging from their 20s to their 60s to their 80s, however, say the stereotype is far from reality.*

Nagimov has seen the famous 1979 photograph. “Personally, we don’t approve of that,” he said, speaking for himself and his classmates.

When you ask a group of Russian men if they kiss each other on the mouth, they respond as a chorus: “No, no, no.” True, they might put an air kiss or even a real kiss on the cheek of a close male relative or longtime friend, especially during a Russian Orthodox holiday. Otherwise, ethnic Russians limit their man-to-man contact to handshakes, shoulder pats and loose hugs. Kissing on the lips, they say, was for political bigwigs back in Soviet times.

Ironically, the stereotype of men kissing on the lips has persisted despite Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda.” Signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in June 2013, the measure criminalizes open affection between people of the same gender if that display can be construed as homosexual. Despite the law, or because of it, almost all of the Russian men asked about their greetings brought up gay issues – or thought they were getting interviewed about same-sex marriage.

Yet the men did not refute the idea of men kissing by saying it was a gay habit, but rather by saying it was non-Russian or non-Slavic.

When Alexander, 80, was asked if he kissed men on the cheek, his wife of six decades cut in, “Oy, no. That’s completely – that’s awful.”

“Not really,” Alexander corrected, as the two paused in a park in southern Moscow. “The East, they meet like this,” he said, touching cheeks with his wife. “Russian Orthodox people, we don’t have that. In the European part of Russia, we generally use handshakes,” he said.

Close friends receive hugs, “but without kissing,” he said. “That shows up more with Politburo members, they kiss in Germany,” he said, referring to Brezhnev’s 1979 lip-lock in East Berlin.

“That’s all in the past,” his wife said.

That is true for most Russian politicians, but Orthodox Russians in fact still kiss on the cheek on religious occasions, particularly on Easter.

Misha Nikulin, 21, one of the students from Russian State Oil and Gas University having dinner at the mall on a recent evening, said Russians greet each other with “Christ is risen!” and then kiss the other person three times, beginning with the right cheek.

Classmate Lyovkin said “it doesn’t matter” what the person’s gender is when it comes to Easter kisses.

Tatyana Dianova, a longtime associate professor in Moscow State University’s Department of Folklore, said there can be ritual embraces between two men in church or on religious holidays.

In general, greetings “really differ depending on the region,” she said. They also vary widely by event, holiday and even whether the person receiving the greeting is working, she said.

Regional norms have determined how much physical contact people use in greeting one another. The amount of affection depends “on the degree of emotional character” in the culture, Dianova said. In the northern and Siberian areas of Russia, “there is less contact in the area of the face,” she said. Face-to-face touching “is more of a southern thing.”

The fact that today’s men do not kiss on the mouth has not diluted the stereotype outside Russia. In a Google search in English, right after the search phrase “Russian men kiss” comes the phrase “Russian men kiss on lips.”

Brezhnev did a lot to form this stereotype. Known for cheek kisses as well as all-out lip locks, the Soviet premier had a number of famous smooches with Eastern Bloc leaders and even non-political guests. Brezhnev smooched U.S. boxer Muhammad Ali during a June 1978 meeting at the Kremlin, kissing the heavyweight champion on both cheeks, the Associated Press reported at the time.

Brezhnev also planted a kiss on the face of U.S. President Jimmy Carter after they signed the SALT II arms reduction agreement in Vienna in June 1979.

The most famous kiss came later that year. In October 1979, Brezhnev met with Erich Honecker, general secretary of East Germany, to mark that communist country’s thirtieth anniversary. At the East Berlin ceremony, the leaders kissed on the mouth multiple times, with Honecker wrapping his lips around Brezhnev’s. French photographer Regis Bossu snapped what became the best-known picture of the kiss, with Honecker angling his head to get under Brezhnev’s nose.

About a decade later, after the Berlin Wall opened, Bossu’s image was rendered on the wall as a giant painting by the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel, who captioned it with the phrase, “My God! Help me to survive this deadly love.”

The East Berlin ceremony, the photograph and the Berlin Wall mural are now international icons. Almost all of the Russian men interviewed for this article mentioned them, either as a vestige of a Soviet political past or as a sign of Brezhnev’s “strange” behavior.

Brezhnev is not the only purveyor of the smooching stereotype, however. Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev also kissed dignitaries. In fact, he kissed Honecker on numerous occasions, though he managed to divert most of those kisses to the cheek.

There is also the 1939 USSR propaganda poster depicting a peasant in a fraying shirt embracing and joining lips with a Red Army soldier carrying a rifle. Atop the Viktor Koretsky poster is a quote attributed to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin: “Our army is the army of the workers’ liberation.” The fraternal kiss wasn’t so liberating, however: In 1939 and 1940, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army invaded, annexed and stationed troops in Eastern European countries.

Within the former Soviet Union and within Russia, other cultural groups have their own customs, though those typically don’t involve any male-to-male lip-locking. In Georgian and Armenian cultures, close male friends will peck each other on the cheek while putting a hand on the other’s back or shaking hands.

In some Central Asian communities, men shake hands much more gently, “placing their hands, thumbs up, in between another’s,” according to Lonely Planet’s Central Asia guide. Men in Kazakhstan, at least in its cities, can be seen doing handshakes with the firm grip typical of Western countries.

In the park in southern Moscow, Sergei Sukhilin, 57, stopped to talk as he strolled, dressed in a sportcoat, with his wife Tatyana and son Artyom.

Sergei is over six feet tall and wide as a tank. He said he reserves kisses on the cheek for female family members. His close male friends get a handshake and a hug, as do his male relatives. Artyom, 24, a tall, skinny man in a black knit cap and wiry beard, said he shakes hands with friends but hugs and kisses his grandfather on the cheek.

“I haven’t kissed guys,” he said self-consciously, with a laugh.

Yet it isn’t just old photos of Brezhnev that have kept the stereotype – or perhaps tradition – alive and well. In September 2011, Australian Hugh Jackman (superhero Wolverine in the X-Men movies, and Jean Valjean in the movie version of Les Miserables), appeared on the Russian TV program Prozhektor Paris Hilton, a comedy roundtable talk show. He asked host Ivan Urgant if it was true that Russian men kiss on the lips. The host replied, “yes, that’s true.” With that, the muscular Jackman seized Urgant’s head and planted a huge kiss on his mouth.

Urgant, who had the popular show on Russia’s main state television Channel 1, was surprised but quickly regained his comedic composure. “Wait for me downstairs,” he quipped to Jackman. RL

* This was hardly a historical one-off: Stalin famously lip-locked with polar navigator Ivan Spirin, and public kisses have been captured on film between Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet politician Kliment Voroshilov and between Mikhail Gorbachev and Honecker.