A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power and propaganda through food

From the favorite meals of Lenin and Stalin, to the diets of the cosmonauts in the early days of Soviet space exploration, to the dish served to the Soviet Union’s leaders at the very moment they decided that the USSR should cease to exist, Witold Szablowski turns over every culinary stone in hot pursuit of the plates that shaped the history of Russia. Telling a story 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, he treks across Stalin’s Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chernobyl, and more-often with one-of-a-kind access to locales forbidden to foreign eyes. With a rousing sense of adventure and an inimitable ability to get people to spill the tea, the author of Dancing Bears and How to Feed a Dictator serves up a chronicle of a global power on a human scale, plated on the very thing that connects us all: food.