Rosja od kuchni. Jak zbudować imperium nożem, chochlą i widelcem

At first glance What’s Cooking in the Kremlin looks like a frivolous book, easily mistaken for a culinary guidebook, or just a recipe book, featuring various forms of Russian cuisine. The author really does include recipes at the end of each chapter for some of the dishes that appear in the stories he tells. But naturally, a seasoned author of reportage of Szabłowski’s calibre is merely using the convention of “lifestyle” literature for his own purposes, and there’s something perverse about this subtle game. Because this journey through tastes and flavours is a way to present the nightmare of the darkest episodes in Russian twentieth-century history. In this book, comedy and narratorial gusto are frequently combined with terror or border on despair. A description of the grand splendour of the tsar’s dinner table merges into an account of the assassination of the last Romanovs. The colourful abundance of Georgian culinary tradition cannot be separated from an attempt to understand the life of Stalin. Readers are likely to feel that Szabłowski is leading them along a tight-rope, taking them on an expedition where there’s a fine balance between the lightness of food writing and the gravity of historical reportage. In this way Szabłowski is continuing the adventure he began with his previous bestselling book, How to Feed a Dictator. In both books he masterfully combines the opposite poles of cookery and crime. And yet What’s Cooking in the Kremlin reveals an entirely new world of facts and incidents. Szabłowski travels to Russia in search of witnesses to the most significant, but also the most traumatic episodes in the history of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Russia, from the reign of Nicholas II to that of Vladimir Putin. He meets people who cooked for the country’s rulers or their descendants, and talks to members of the inner circle of inaccessible Kremlin leaders, giving us a unique opportunity to learn about Russia from an unfamiliar angle. But the war in Ukraine makes this book even more acute and timely than it might have been. Superbly written and hard to put down, it is an unquestionably successful attempt to face up to the demons of imperialism. I can recommend following in Witold Szabłowski’s footsteps as he tries to understand Russia and its empire through the kitchen.