What's Cooking in the Kremlin (eBook)

Introduction

All at once the smells of gasoline, fruit wine, and partly digested fried fish hit my nostrils. The gasoline was coming from a cutter that had headed out to sea around an hour ago, and the wine and fish must have been from the stomach of the drunken janitor who had thrown up under my window. There I lay in bed, still half-asleep, listening to the roar of the Black Sea and watching some policemen representing the Republic of Abkhazia—a self-proclaimed orphan of the Soviet Union recognized only by Russia—as they searched my room. In the doorway stood the flustered manager of the holiday resort where I was perching for the night, repeating, not exactly to me and not exactly to the policemen, “Not meant to be here. I don’t know how he got here.”

He was telling the truth. He didn’t know.

So for the second or third time I explained that I’d arrived late at night, that the drunken janitor—the same man who would later sing bawdy songs in Russian, and later still vomit under my window—had let me in and said I should go to bed, that we’d settle up in the morning.

When the police found nothing suspicious on me, it started to dawn on the manager that he’d made a mistake and set the functionaries on an innocent man. Luckily the policemen let it drop. They made some jokes, took a few Russian rubles off me for a cup of tea, and were gone.

I was left with the manager, who was feeling pretty stupid. He made coffee in a small pot, first for me and then for himself, and we drank it in silence while he wondered whether to try to placate me. He decided to give it a try and offered me a glass of chacha—a very strong spirit made of grapes—to go with my coffee (I refused it, because it was seven in the morning). Then out of the blue he asked if I knew where we were.

“In New Athos, in Abkhazia,” I replied, yawning.

But the manager violently shook his head, saying that it was true, but not entirely. And that I was to follow him. So we drank up our coffee, and off we went. First he unlocked a chain hanging on a gate, then he led me through a secret tunnel that ran under the street and a few dozen yards beyond. All of a sudden, we were in a garden of paradise. I’m not exaggerating. Around us grew both pine trees and palms; the milk from coconuts that had fallen and cracked against the asphalt was flowing down the path. Two beautiful black horses were licking it up, and two more, bays, were grazing a short way off. As we walked along the path, brightly colored birds chased one another between the bushes.

Beyond all this, the path began to lead uphill.

On the way we passed a sign that read PROPERTY OF THE PRESIDENT OF ABKHAZIA—NO ENTRY. Beside it stood two agents who were there to guard the grounds, but the manager waved to them and they let us through. Green-and-brown lizards raced underfoot, and bird after bird screeched overhead. Finally the asphalt ended, and we were standing outside a small green house on a hillside. The view was stunning: palm trees, forest, and the turquoise sea looming below.

“This place is top secret. It used to be Stalin’s summer dacha,” said the manager. “He came here on vacation every year toward the end of his life. The house where you slept was built later on, but it’s also part of his estate.”

Suddenly it all made sense. For decades this place had been accessible to only a small number of people. Stalin had died, the Soviet Union had collapsed, but no one had rescinded the order to keep it as hidden as possible from the eyes of outsiders. The cottages were probably rented to tourists illegally—maybe even Stalin’s villa was rented out. Who knows—in a nonexistent country, anything’s possible. But tourists from Russia, a common sight here, are one thing, while someone from Poland is quite another. That’s why the manager panicked and called the police.

I started wondering how I could see inside the dacha. And the manager seemed to read my mind.

“I don’t have the key.” He spread his hands. “But my colleague has it. If you’d like, I’ll ask him to let us in this evening.”

So I spent the day touring the sights of New Athos, and then went back. The manager was already waiting with several other men. One of them was named Aslan; tall and graying, he was the one who had the key, and in the days of the Soviet Union he’d recorded conversations with the people who’d worked at Stalin’s dacha. He let us in and told us step by step how it had been built, when exactly Stalin had arrived here, in which room and on which bed he’d slept.

Meanwhile, the other men made a bonfire and started to cook lamb shashliks. They put raw onion on some plates as well as adjika, a sauce for the meat made of hot red peppers, garlic, herbs, and walnuts. They also poured chacha—now was the right time to drink it. They all worked here on the dacha grounds: one was the gardener, another the watchman, and a third looked after the horses. They were old enough to remember the bloody war that had erupted in 1992, following the collapse of the USSR, when—with Russia’s help—Abkhazia had broken away from Georgia. We raised a toast to our meeting, we drank, and I wondered how to ask them what they thought about the war and what it had brought to their quasimini-country. Luckily the manager read my mind again.

“Russia, Georgia, what a pair of fuckers,” he said, chasing the chacha with watermelon. “Both of them are only after our beaches and our money. We shed blood, and that just makes things worse.”

The others nodded in agreement.

After the war Abkhazia separated from Georgia, but though once rich—it was known as the Soviet Côte d’Azur—the country came to a complete standstill. The only things they live on here are mandarin farming and Russian tourists. Because no one except Russia has recognized their statehood, hardly anyone but Russians ever comes here; within the mountain landscape, the richly decorated buildings are now buried in the undergrowth.

“Life hasn’t been good since Stalin’s day,” the manager went on, as his pals poured us each another glass of chacha. “He understood this land. He ate our bread, he ate our fish, he ate our salt.”

The others nodded again.

“Stalin was like us. He ate the same things as the ordinary people,” said the man who cared for the horses. “Over there, behind the dacha, is his kitchen. My grandfather worked there as a servant, he told me.”

We drank up again, and the chacha started singing in my head. As the shashliks roasted on the open fire, I went to take a leak. I chose a spot just behind Stalin’s kitchen, and on my way back I peeked inside through the window. As in the dacha, everything there was original—the burners, the floor, the table, even the pots and stools. I began to wonder who the cook had been who’d worked here. What had he made for Stalin? Had he wanted to run away from this place, or had he stood beside the Sun of Nations and bathed in his warmth?

It was just then, feeling slightly tipsy, that I first had the thought that I’d like to know if Stalin really did eat like “the ordinary people.” If so, then why? And if not, then why did they think he had?

So that was how, on a warm evening around ten years ago, the idea for this book was born.

It spent a few years marinating inside me, and once I finally got down to some serious work on it, I traveled throughout several of the former Soviet republics. I talked to the chefs of Communist Party general secretaries, cosmonauts, and frontline soldiers, and to cooks from Chernobyl* and from the war in Afghanistan. I soon discovered that Stalin hadn’t eaten like the average Abkhaz at all, nor like the average Soviet citizen. And along the way I discovered several other culinary secrets— both his and his successors’.

In this book you will learn how, when, and why Stalin’s cook taught Gorbachev’s cook to sing to his dough. How Nina, a cook during the war in Afghanistan, forced herself to think about something pleasant in the hope of imparting her good mood to the soldiers. How in Chernobyl, a few weeks after the catastrophe, a competition was held for the best canteen, and who won it.

You’ll read about Stalin’s food tester, who fought an unequal fight against the tyrant and his cronies in an effort to save his wife’s life. You’ll also find a recipe for the first soup to have flown into outer space. And for pasta with turtle doves, eaten by the last tsar, Nicholas II. You’ll find out why Brezhnev hated caviar.

And you’ll read about people who had nothing to eat at all: in Ukraine, when Stalin tried to break its back by starving its citizens, and during the siege of Leningrad.

But above all you’ll see how food can be a tool for propaganda. In a country like the Soviet Union, every pork chop fried and dished up in every canteen and restaurant from Kaliningrad to the Arctic Circle, from Kishinev to Vladivostok, was of service to propaganda. What the general secretary of the Communist Party ate and what the ordinary citizen ate were political. Just as the USSR did for decades, Russia still feeds its people on propaganda.

It’s no accident that Vladimir Putin, grandson of the cook Spiridon Putin, is in charge there. You’ll read about both of them in this book.

I’m told that these days you can visit Stalin’s dacha in...