Handshake-Free Zone

Health organizations are advising us to put handshakes on hold. But, as we figure out a way to circumvent that well-established greeting and teach ourselves not to touch our faces, we can also look back at the early Soviet years, a century ago, when the young state made personal hygiene and public sanitation an important part of its ideology, even launching anti-handshake campaigns.

Social campaigns were a large part of early Soviet propaganda, for which some of the best minds were recruited. The country needed to engineer a whole new industrial working class, and for that it had to recruit peasants from the countryside and cram them into dense kommunalkas (communal apartments) and large dormitories.

Hygiene propaganda was just as important as literacy campaigns, and evening radio shows included Evening Hygiene Education Talks (Вечерние беседы Санпросвета). A 1923 issue of the magazine Daily Life and Youth («Быт и молодежь») slammed handshakes as a “criminal invention of priests and the bourgeoisie who wanted to infect the oppressed workers and peasants.” To avoid infection, schoolchildren were advised to use the Pioneer’s greeting (a modification of the Scout salute) rather than shake hands. Anti-handshake pins produced in that era can still be found in antique shops.

The anti-handshake campaign was well documented by period writers like Mikhail Bulgakov and Ilf and Petrov. Mayakovsky was actually asked to produce a series of hygiene-promoting posters, one of which demanded “Away with handshakes! Greet one another and say goodbye without handshakes!”

Долой рукопожатия!
                             Без рукопожатий
встречайте друг друга
                             и провожайте.

Another says: “What other mouths took in, you keep out of your own!”

A total of 35 such posters were produced, telling the new Soviet man to brush his teeth, sleep in a well-ventilated room, and not to spit on the floor. Some of these habits were difficult to adopt for people who grew up in peasant households in poor rural villages.

The recommendation to avoid shaking hands probably originated as a precaution during the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which took between 500,000 and three million Russian souls. This, followed by the Civil War and the associated cholera and typhoid epidemics, meant that handshakes were frowned upon throughout the 1920s, under the long-serving Commissar of Public Health Nikolai Semashko.

Good hygiene practices were upheld as a struggle for communism in the 1930s, and the Red Cross in the Soviet Union focused on building up “sanitary defenses” at factories and collective farms. Hygiene “troikas” were appointed to keep dormitories clean.

History may not repeat itself, as someone once said, but it does rhyme. Or perhaps it merely echoes.