Rusko pohledem z kuchyně - Jak budovat impérium nožem, naběračkou a vidličkou – Szablowski Witold (2023)

Why was the last Russian tsar shot along with his chef? Who took care of Stalin's menu at his secret dacha near Moscow? What did the first liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster eat? The new book by Witold Szabłowski thematically follows up on the bestseller How to Feed a Dictator, but this time the author traces the paths of the chefs before whose eyes and over whose dishes the history of Russia and the Soviet Union was shaped. In eighteen stories, he narrates the fates of people who cooked for the country's leaders from Nicholas II to Putin, as well as for Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan. He meets with survivors of the famine in Ukraine and the blockade of Leningrad, takes us "into the kitchen" of the besieged Azovstal factory in Mariupol. He reveals what the first cosmonauts ate, but also tries to figure out how much truth there is in Putin's story that his grandfather cooked for Lenin and Stalin. Above all, this book is about how seemingly innocent culinary art can be exploited for political purposes and how the Russian empire has skillfully fed its inhabitants propaganda throughout the ages. When we peek under the lid of the Russian regime, we get a unique view of the fate of the country from the last gasps of tsarism to the present day, complemented by a number of recipes...