What's Cooking in the Kremlin

A Modern History of Russia Through the Kitchen Door

Witold Szabłowski, Antonia Lloyd-Jones

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781837730216
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

'A spicy and original romp through Russian history' ROBERT SERVICE

'Poignant, comical, and in the best sense disturbing' PAUL FREEDMAN, AUTHOR OF TEN RESTAURANTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA

'This wickedly delicious tale uncovers the secret, gustatory history of the Kremlin and will leave you begging for seconds' DOUGLAS SMITH, AUTHOR OF RASPUTIN: FAITH, POWER, AND THE TWILIGHT OF THE ROMANOVS


What's Cooking in the Kremlin is a tale of feast and famine told from the kitchen, the narrative of one of the most complex, troubling and fascinating nations on earth.

We will travel through Putin's Russia with acclaimed author Witold Szab?owski as he learns the story of the chef who was shot alongside the Romonovs, and the Ukrainian woman who survived the Great Famine created by Stalin and still weeps with guilt; the soldiers on the Eastern front who roasted snails and made nettle soup as they fought back Hitler's army; the woman who cooked for Yuri Gagarin and the cosmonauts, and the man who ran the Kremlin kitchen during the years of plenty under Brezhnev. We will hear from the women who fed the firefighters at Chernobyl, and the story of the Crimean Tatars, who returned to their homeland after decades of exile, only to flee once Russia invaded Crimea again, in 2014.

In tracking down these remarkable stories and voices, Witold Szab?owski has written an account of modern Russia unlike any other - a book that reminds us of the human stories behind the history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. The Last Tsar’s Chef
• II. Lenin’s Cook
• III. The Great Famine
• IV. A Meeting in the Mountains: Stalin’s Eating Habits
• V. Beauty and Beria: Stalin’s Cook and His Wife
• VI. A Baker in Besieged Leningrad
• VII. Exhumation: Cooking in Wartime
• VIII. The Feast at Yalta
• IX. Gagarin’s Cook
• X. The Kremlin Chef
• XI. The Cook from the Afghan War
• XII. The First Return of Viktor Belyaev
• XIII. The Fairy-Tale Forest: Cooking at Chernobyl
• XIV. The Second Return of Viktor Belyaev
• XV. Wild Boar Goulash, or the Soviet Union’s Last Supper
• XVI. The Sanatorium Cook
• XVII. Crimean Tatar Cuisine
• XVIII. The Third Return of Viktor Belyaev
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Photo Credits