Back Forty: Russia’s long history of hunger
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By Christopher Ketcham
If you want to tell a foodie history of modern Russia, it will be rife with starvation. You’ll hear how people ate twigs, weeds, and dried straw during the Soviet famine of 1930-33. They boiled soups of pine needles, bark, and cones. Some dug handfuls of grain out of rodent burrows, and some ate each other. You’ll discover that Joseph Stalin, the architect of the famine, didn’t like the smell of food cooking and, as a young man, hated doing dishes, to the point that wherever he set foot in his career as a tyrant, he ordered the kitchen always to be placed as far as possible from his living quarters.
Such is the stuff to be gleaned from Polish travel journalist Witold Szablowski’s meandering yet delightful book of culinary travelogue, What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork. The title is misleading, as we don’t get much on empire-building. We do learn that Stalin and Winston Churchill, meeting at Yalta, ate smoked sturgeon and red and black caviar; that Stalin mostly abstained from alcohol but forced the members of the Central Committee to get drunk and dance for him; that Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union from 1964 to1982, loved goulash made with wild boar and mushrooms which he sometimes cooked himself; and that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s wife wanted him to take homegrown onions into space but he refused because there was “no chance of smuggling a single onion onto the rocket.”
The dearth of material to back up the empire-building claim is compounded by the failure to place the fascinating tales of hunger and brutality into the broader context of how and whether such deprivation shaped the Russian relationship to food in enduring ways. Of all histories there are few as epic as Russia’s, but Szablowski hardly touches on that dramatic sweep.
However, it’s the tidbits of the daily work of chefs and other Kremlin kitchen staff, satisfying the prandial desires of psychopaths like Lenin and Stalin, that prove the book’s worth as something more than a collection of amusing anecdotes. Better still, the author gives over whole chapters to the voices of average Russians, a Studs Terkel history of food, life, death, and dictatorship that’s admirable for its honesty, tenderness, and immutable sorrow. (Szablowski went partly down this same road in 2020 with How to Feed a Dictator, in which he hunted up the chefs and sous chefs who kept Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot fat and happy.)
No one remains alive who fed Tsar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, so Szablowski had to rely on historical documents and the hearsay of the great-grandchildren of his kitchen staff. “My great-grandfather was friendly with the pastry cook Potupchikov,” one elderly woman tells him during a meal of pickled mushrooms and pate. Over the course of generations Potupchikov’s family had been making cookies and cakes for the Romanovs, allegedly for more than 200 years. Potupchikov had taught this woman’s great-grandfather to serve Nicholas “frozen strawberries flavored with lemon juice, almonds, and violet petals.” The tsar and his family enjoyed sumptuous meals that Szablowski takes pains to itemize, sometimes by date. On October 10, 1906, for example — as the Russian famine of 1906-08 was kicking off — the family feasted on cream of asparagus soup, lobster, leg of wild goat, celery salad, peaches, and coffee.
On the night before Lenin ordered the tsar and his family shot, in July 1918, the quality of the fare had declined considerably. They were forced to suffer “modest soldiers’ rations.” One imagines Lenin celebrating the liquidation with a bowl of his favorite dish, buckwheat, to which Russians ascribe “magical and therapeutic properties.” (It has been called Russian Viagra.) A typical menu for Stalin was somewhat wider-ranging than his bloodthirsty colleague, though he, too, apparently preferred “simple and unpretentious foods”: meat soup with sauerkraut, or buckwheat with butter and a slice of beef, and for dessert cranberry jelly or a fruit compote.
The pace picks up and the oral histories ripple with tension when we get to tell-alls from the tragic famine years. Ninety-five-year-old Hanna Basaraba, of Rostivka, a village in the Ukraine, recalls the horrors of the Holodomor, the epochal famine of 1932-33 that was largely imposed by Stalin’s policies of collectivized agriculture and that killed millions of Ukrainians. During that period, Szablowski reports, every seven minutes someone in Ukraine died of starvation. Basaraba was a little girl at the time and attending school, where she was fed a thin soup, the only meal of the day.
“With our skinny little legs, skinny little arms, and huge bellies, we all looked the same,” she said. “Imagine a group of 30 children who aren’t playing because they don’t have the strength … So we’d sit there, rocking and dozing. I can remember several occasions when one of the children failed to get up again.” One day, a neighbor, Hanku Kartoplyova, went mad and ate her own children. Hanna’s mother then tells her, “You are never ever to go to Hanku Kartoplyova’s house for any reason at all.”
Among the menus and recipes sprinkled throughout the book is one that was found written on a tattered piece of paper during the 872-day siege of Leningrad during World War II, as Nazi forces blockaded the city from 1941 to 1944, bombing it relentlessly. Sixteen-year-old Valentina Chepko, in the winter of 1941, wrote out her preferred three-course meal “for after starvation, if I’m still alive.” It went:
First course: soup — potato and mushroom, or pickled cabbage and meat.
Second course: Kasha — oatmeal with butter, millet, pearl barley, buckwheat, rice, or semolina.
Meat course: meatballs with mashed potatoes; sausages with mashed potatoes or Kasha.
“But there’s no point in dreaming about this,” she wrote at the end of the menu, “because we won’t live to see it!” By February 1942, Chepko was dead.
At Leningrad, the recipe for Blockade Bread included a “pinch of yeast made from timber waste.” One of the teenage bakers who worked tirelessly to make Blockade Bread and feed the population, who survived when so many people she knew perished, tells Szablowski about the insomnia that afflicts her. “Sometimes I can’t get to sleep at night because I’m thinking. About my dad. About the children from our communal building. About Vyacheslav the baker … about all the people who died in Leningrad during that dreadful blockade, over whose bones we walk here every day. And then I weep into my pillow, Witold, because what else can I do?”