Germany: It was a sign of communist solidarity, performed whenever the Soviet bloc's rulers met in public.
But yesterday the former communist leader Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski revealed that the worst part of his job while he was running Poland in the 1980s was not dealing with challenges to his rule but having to kiss Erich Honecker, his east German counterpart.
"He [ Honecker] had this disgusting way of kissing," Gen Jaruzelski, now 81, said yesterday.
"We used to hug each other. Back then he already had negative characteristics in my eyes, this dogmatism," he told German newspaper Die Welt.
Honecker is better known for kissing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But Gen Jaruzelski's remarks suggest that almost all the communist leaders who visited Honecker before his country disappeared in 1990 suffered the same embarrassing fate.
Gen Jaruzelski - who declared martial law in 1981 with the aim of stamping out Poland's Solidarity movement - also recalled how Margaret Thatcher invited him to Chequers in June 1989, when eastern Europe's communist regimes were all crumbling.
"She grabbed me by the buttons of my jacket and said to me urgently: 'We cannot allow German reunification! You have to protest against it very loudly!'"
Yesterday Norbert Potzl, a biographer of Honecker, who died in 1994, confirmed that kissing between communist leaders was normal, adding: "Whether Honecker was a particularly sloppy kisser, I don't know. But it's clear that the two men didn't like each other." - (Guardian Service)