What's Cooking in the Kremlin

August 28, 2023
Journalist Szablowski (How to Feed a Dictator) serves up a culinary travelogue infused with dark and savory legends from Russia’s kitchens, dachas, cafeterias, and canteens. He interviews the great-granddaughter of one of Czar Nicholas II’s cooks to find out what the czar and his family ate in their final days before Bolshevik guards executed the whole family, including their chef; evaluates Lenin’s diet of fried eggs, raw milk, and boiled buckwheat for its revolutionary health benefits (and risks); muses on how Stalin’s love for his native Georgian food brought a “genuine gastronomic revolution” to the U.S.S.R.; and relays firsthand accounts from survivors of the 1930s famine in Ukraine and the 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad about eating soups made from pinecones and breads baked with ground tree bark. Among those he spotlights are Faina Kazetska, the Star City cook who prepared meals for Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet cosmonauts; the dozen young women from Pripyat who cooked for the cleanup crews after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl; and Kremlin chef Viktor Belyaev, whose lavish feasts dazzled delegations of Western leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon. Szablowski’s account is enriched with recipes gathered during his travels throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several ex-Soviet republics. Readers will be satiated by this easily digestible gastronomic history.

September 15, 2023
Penetrating the secrets of the Kremlin through delightful chronicles of the long-suffering chefs who catered to Russian leaders. In an original work of social history, Polish journalist Szablowski, the author of How To Feed a Dictator and Dancing Bears, alternates narrative with interviews (and recipes) to delve into some recondite and often apocryphal stories of the people who cooked for the Russian elite, from Ivan Kharitonov, the chef executed with Tsar Nicholas II in 1918; to Polina Ivanovna, who cooked "the Soviet Union's last supper." What the author learned can be summed up in two sentences of Russian propaganda: "It doesn't matter if a story is true. What matters is that people believe it." Case in point: Vladimir Putin's grandfather, Spirodin, cooked in various Russian sanitoriums, but claiming that he served Russian leaders from Rasputin to Stalin was great propaganda when Putin was campaigning for office. Over years, Szablowski has tracked down many of his elusive subjects, and he tells a wide variety of entertaining stories about this colorful cast of characters, including longtime Kremlin chef Viltor Belyaev, who relates detailed, chilling, and priceless stories about cooking for Brezhnev and Gorbachev; the devoted cook who created food in tubes for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's mission to space in 1961; and the doomed kitchen staff assembled for the clean-up crew after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The author includes horrific eyewitness accounts of Ukrainians surviving the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 ("Every seven minutes someone in Ukraine died of starvation"), as well as those who suffered during the two-year German siege of Leningrad. Szablowski also relates the saga of the intrepid "Mama Nina," who cooked for a Soviet airbase in Afghanistan, with little understanding of the nature of the war. The author closes with a poignant, timely look at the tenuous culinary culture of the Tatars, who were nearly eliminated from Crimea. A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.