What's Cooking in the Kremlin

From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork

By: Witold Szablowski, Antonia Lloyd-Jones - translator

Narrated by: David Garelik, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman

“Riveting—a 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 by an award-winning Polish journalist that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food

In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabłowski has tracked down—and broken bread with—people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world’s superpowers.

In revealing what Tsar Nicholas II’s and Lenin’s favorite meals were, why Stalin’s cook taught Gorbachev’s 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 Union’s leaders at the very moment they decided the USSR should cease to exist, and whether Putin’s grandfather really did cook for Lenin and Stalin, Szabłowski has written a fascinating oral history—complete with recipes—of Russia’s evolution from culinary indifference to decadence, famine to feasts, and of the Kremlin’s Olympics-style preoccupation with food as an expression of the country’s global standing.

Traveling across Stalin’s Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol—often 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 tea—he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.

©2023 Witold Szablowski (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Chatty and illuminating.” —The New York Times

“A culinary travelogue infused with dark and savory legends from Russia’s kitchens, dachas, cafeterias, and canteens . . . enriched with recipes gathered during [Szabłowski’s] travels throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several ex-Soviet republics. Readers will be satiated by this easily digestible gastronomic history.” —Publishers Weekly

“By turns poignant and playful, What’s Cooking in the Kremlin offers an invaluable history of Russia viewed from the kitchen and told through engaging stories and oral histories given by cooks who survived the vagaries of the Kremlin’s whims and who toiled through the great afflictions of collectivization, the Siege of Leningrad, the Chernobyl disaster, and more.” —Darra Goldstein, author of A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast, and Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore

A People’s Political history of Russia

Privileged insights from village/rural people of Russian about the personalities, politics, wars, culture and food of the Russian people- - from the tsars to Putin and the Afghan and Ukrainian wars. Very interesting and well done!

Really great read!

A great bit of history, and very to date. Great bit of Russian lore, very readable.