What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork

A New York Times Editors Choice Entertaining . . . A heady mix of propaganda and paranoia . . . [Szabowski writes] sensitively . . . not just about food but also its terrible absence. The New York Times Book Review Rivetinga delicious odyssey full of history, humor, and jaw-dropping stories. If you want to understand the making of modern Russia, read this book. Daniel Stone, bestselling author of The Food Explorer A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food, by an award-winning Polish journalist whos been praised by both Timothy Snyder and Bill Buford In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabowski has tracked downand broken bread withpeople whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the worlds superpowers. In revealing what Tsar Nicholas IIs and Lenins favorite meals were, why Stalins cook taught Gorbachevs cook to sing to his dough, how Stalin had a food tester while he was starving the Ukrainians during the Great Famine, what the recipe was for the first soup flown into outer space, why Brezhnev hated caviar, what was served to the Soviet Unions leaders at the very moment they decided the USSR should cease to exist, and whether Putins grandfather really did cook for Lenin and Stalin, Szabowski has written a fascinating oral historycomplete with recipes and photosof Russias evolution from culinary indifference to decadence, famine to feasts, and of the Kremlins Olympics-style preoccupation with food as an expression of the countrys global standing. Traveling across Stalins Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupoloften with one-of-a-kind access to locales forbidden to foreign eyes, and with a rousing sense of adventure and an inimitable ability to get people to spill the teahe shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.