The Soviet Kiss, Gone But (Mostly) Not Missed

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin looks unsure as pilot Valery Chkalov (right) leans in for a kiss in 1936. 

By 1937, Stalin seems to have warmed to the practice. Here, he lunges for a peck from pilot Vasily Molokov. 
 

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).

 

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).

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.

And no one kissed like Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, pictured (center) greeting communist heart-throb Konstantin Chernenko in Crimea in 1980.

As Brezhnev locks lips with Nikolai Podgorny in the Kremlin in 1975, two elder statesmen (right) suffer instant demotion to third and fourth wheels.

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.

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.

 

Three years before the Berlin Wall came down, Honecker grips Gorbachev tight during the latter's state visit to East Germany in 1986.

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.

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.

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.