The Pleasures and Perils of the Russian Banya
MOSCOW, Sep 4, 2000 -- (AFP) The bath house, or "banya," no less than the vodka bottle, has been a cornerstone of Russian life for centuries -- a place for letting off steam, as well as soaking it in, among friends and family.Not even the highest in the land is immune to the ritualistic delights of sweltering in up to 60-degree Celsius (140-degree Fahrenheit) heat.
On March 26 this year, Russians went to the polls to elect a successor to former president Boris Yeltsin. Asked how he planned to spend the nail-biting hours until the result was declared, the eventual winner Vladimir Putin replied: "I'm off to the banya."
In 1999, on arriving in Kosovo as part of the international peacekeeping force, the first thing Russian paratroopers did was to construct the obligatory steam baths.
"The banya is to the Russians what the cafe is to the French or the pub to the English, a place to relax with friends," observes Vasily Alexeyevich, a 45-year-old journalist and habitue of the Sandunovskye baths, the oldest in Moscow.
This sulfuric ritual is immutable: four or five spells in the suffocating heat of the "parilka", or steam room, interspersed by plunges into a pool of ice-cold water, rounded off with a medley of beer, vodka and smoked fish.
The banya is part of Russia's cultural heritage. "Even the smallest village has a Russian bath. There are two things a Russian cannot do without: his cup of tea twice a day and his steam bath once a week," wrote the French writer Alexandre Dumas in 1850.
Moreover, a trip to the bath house is for many Russians a badge of friendship, a mark of trust.
"We haven't been to the sauna yet, but it could happen," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said during Putin's visit to Berlin earlier this year, in a reference to the banya outing which their respective predecessors, Helmut Kohl and Yeltsin, used to seal bilateral relations.
And the same goes in the world of big business, with Russian tycoons often preferring the banya to the boardroom as a venue for dealing with their at first bashful Western counterparts.
"Once you get naked in the banya together and drink a bottle or two, relations soon improve," one visiting businessman conceded finally.
And what's more, the banya is apparently just what the Russian doctor ordered, combating stress and purging toxins from the body, while being gently whipped by birch and eucalyptus branches, also part of the ritual, is said to clear out the lungs, tone the muscles and improve the skin.
Mothers take their children to the banya hoping to buy health and heartiness for their offspring at two or three dollars a time.
Meanwhile, Russia's infamous "businessmen" -- the so-called "new Russians" with their hyper-rich, gangster lifestyles -- pay 70 dollars an hour to steam off in a banya deluxe.
But inevitably -- this being Russia -- corruption lurks within the banya as well as purity of lungs and skin. The bathhouse has its share of perils as well as pleasures -- and has been the graveyard, sometimes literally, of a high-flying career.
For example, the country's former justice minister Valentin Kovalev was peremptorily sacked after television channels broadcast video film of his cavorting with naked women in a banya frequented by the Russian Mafia.
Last September, Ilya Nepochatykh, the 29-year-old head of a Saint Petersburg real estate agency, was brutally murdered in a banya where he had been relaxing with a group of friends and prostitutes.
Two months earlier, a TNT bomb was defused only moments before it was set to explode in a Moscow bath house whose regular customers included many of the city's business elite.