Sarah Henderson, associate professor of political science at Oregon State University, will review What’s Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szablowski as part of the library’s Random Review series .
This program is slated for Wednesday, Dec. 11 at noon, at the Corvallis-Benton County Library’s Main Meeting Room. It will also be streamed live online.
What’s Cooking in the Kremlin, written by Polish journalist Szablowski and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is an easily digestible history of the past 100 years of Russia and the Soviet Union through the lens of food, feasts and famines — with special focus on those who cooked for Russian leaders. From the kitchen of the final czar to his and his family’s last meal, from poisoned cakes in the Kremlin to salads prepared for cleanup workers at Chernobyl, Szablowski shows how food (and its lack) has been used by successive regimes as propaganda and weapon as well as nourishment.
Sarah Henderson has been teaching political science classes, including Russian politics, democracy and autocracy, at OSU since arriving in Corvallis in 2000. Her research often focuses on Russian politics, gender and politics globally. She has visited the USSR, Russia and former Soviet republics many times, including a semester in East Berlin as a high school senior with her parents, who were doing research in then East Germany. She visited Russia for the first time in 1992 on a study abroad program, and has since been on research trips that have taken her from the Arctic Circle to the Caucasus and the Russian Far East. She lives in Corvallis with her husband and two teenagers, with whom she loves to travel to new places.
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