Naked politics

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Leo Brezhnev: "Greetings, comrade! Did you get my bottle of vodka?"
Willy Brandt: "Sure thing, mein Herr. When are we playing water polo?"

It wasn't just Brezhnev and Brandt who used to sweat for the sake of peace. In times of conflict, especially during the Cold War, the sauna was a very popular place for important diplomatic conversations. In politics, especially in the peace & disarming business, sometimes the whole body had to be employed. Oops... this sounded kinda wrong? Anyway. Top-ranking officials, diplomats, politicians and public figures would gladly throw all the clothes away and discuss delicate and hot topics while sitting on their bare asses inside the wooden cabin. Probably the idea of the whole undertaking was that when you're naked you don't have anything to hide, and this creates a sense of trust. Or something.

The political efficacy of the sauna was discovered and taken very seriously by most communist apparatchiks. In the late 60s the DDR leadership even created a special spa hotel called Fischland at the Baltic coast, in whose sauna some of the most prominent foreign guests would stay for hours and sweat together with their commie hosts. Perfect idyll, no doubt!

The legendary friendship between West Germany chancellor Brandt and the Soviet chairman Brezhnev was also born in a naked atmosphere (oooh, that's kinda kinky!) That happened in the early 70s when the two love-birds were discussing a "new eastern policy", and a "new western policy", respectively. And by the way that discussion continued for 16 hours! I'm not gonna try to guess what they were doing inside all that time! But it's a fact that the result was a mutual trust being built between those two and their countries. Well, that meeting happened in a relatively warmer place, the famous Yalta resort in Crimea, at the Black Sea coast where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had divided Europe between themselves. This new meeting in the sauna led to a major improvement in the Soviet-German relations, just 25 years after the end of WW2, which is kinda remarkable. They almost stopped seeing each other as enemy.

The "bath friendship" continued in a sweaty amity between Helmut Kohl and Boris Yeltsin. In 1993 they met in a sauna at the Baltic coast and they negotiated the withdrawal of the Russian troops from East Germany, a major step to the integration of the former DDR into united Germany. It was again in the sauna where, amidst sweaty steamy bodies, the two countries said bye-bye to the notion that the other one was the "nemesis". They had gotten over their grudges over a cup of hot Russian tea. I can tell you for sure the Russkies know a thing or two about body health. You've got to level the inside body temperature with the outside one. If it's cold outside, you should eat ice-cream. And if it's hot outside, you should drink tea. Yeah, smart Russkies!

The sauna tradition in diplomacy is very alive and well even today. It's taking over Brussels now. The Finnish Euro commissioner Olli Rehn (who's a big fan of steam baths anyway, and probably likes singing opera pieces under the shower), is a very popular guy these days when Greece urgently needs another rescue straw from the EU. Last week he invited a handful of journalists (all men, hehe) in a sauna in the basement of the European Commission. Apparently some very important insights were being exchanged there in a sweaty and steamy atmosphere. The naked truth, so to speak, about the real state of Greece. Top secret, of course. No info leaked out. And apparently that method worked, because a few hours later the German parliament agreed to dispense extra money onto Greece.

Only this time Olli's exclusive sauna-involving information policy earned him a lot of criticism. He had apparently forgotten that the top ranking politicians are supposed to inform the public about these sauna proceedings. Not just a few representatives of said public (and all of them men, at that! can you trust them after a few vodkas?) I'm sure the female journalists must also have some interesting proposals on the subject. And oh, I'm not talking about body activities! :)