How Ukraine’s national dish became a symbol of Putin’s invasion
On 25 February 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock and bouts of crying and doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realised that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities for a book I was working on, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch, a beet soup that Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.
I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch – ȈȕȗȠ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end, that’s a Yiddish addition – at least twice a week; after we emigrated in 1974, it signified for me the complicated, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, New York, where I live, a big pot made by my mother usually sat in my fridge. But who did have the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally personal.
Back in Moscow, in the politically stagnant 1970s, I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish”. It was just there, a piece of our shared Soviet reality like the brown winter snow or the buses filled with hangover breath or my scratchy wool school uniform. Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch with its reek of stale cabbage was to be endured at kindergartens, hospitals and workers’ canteens across the 11 time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s sweet ingenuity – although to me it all tasted kind of the same in the end.
My mother was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding the carrots, cabbage and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel
family pot. It was herrecipe, she always insisted, a miracle of shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root veggies. In the fall she’d add a tart Antonovka apple; in winter maybe a glob of American ketchup for a piquant, faintly dissident touch.
Ukraine became an independent state in 1991, having been an original republic of the USSR, and part of the Russian empire since the late 1700s. The earliest known mention of borsch dates from 1584, in the diary of a German merchant who travelled to Kyiv when most of present-day Ukraine belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – well before Ukraine orRussia developed any modern form of national consciousness. The Slavic word borsch most likely referred to hogweed back then, a common plant that was often fermented and used for a sour green potage. The deep-red soup we all know must have developed towards the start of the 18th century as the cultivation of beetroot in eastern Europe took off. From then on, mentions of borsch in Russian cookbooks became fairly common, although often referencing “Malorossiya” (Little Russia) – the imperial term for Ukraine.
The Soviets themselves never denied borsch its Ukrainian origins. Parallel to our frugal quotidian beet soup was a dish the propaganda-puffed recipe books (boasting of the diverse cuisines of ourSoviet republics) presented as thereal Ukrainian borsch. A baroque meal in a bowl, thick enough to stand a spoon in, it brimmed with all kinds of meats – meats! – nobody ever saw at a store. Although that borsch supposedly celebrated Ukrainianness, it was a socialist-realist fiction, of course, a Soviet folkloric-kitsch rebranding of Ukraine as our scarlet empire’s wholesome breadbasket – a Ukraine scrubbed of the horrors of Stalin’s state-induced famines, of the repressions of its language, culture and any authentic expressions of nationalism. In a political system where the Kremlin socially engineered identities and assigned cultural heritage to the Soviet republics, that borsch was an imperial possession of almighty Moscow – as was Ukraine itself, implicitly always a lesser nation than Russia, or perhaps not even a nation at all, as Putin now would have us believe.
I’d never thought much about that “real” Ukrainian borsch until 1989, 15 years after my mum and I immigrated to the US, when I wrote my first cookbook, Please to the Table. My book, too, meant to celebrate the culinary diversity of the Soviet republics – an imperialist-tainted project, perhaps, I now think, uneasily, in retrospect. A deeply ironic one, for sure, because MikhailGorbachev’s creaking imperium was coming apart at the seams as my book went into print and the Soviet republics kept asserting their independence. Researching borsch in western Ukraine in those twilight days of the USSR, I was shocked to discover versions I never suspected existed: borsch with white sugar beets and porcini mushrooms; with fermented beet kvass; with smoky dried pears and wild game shot by a hunter we’d met on the road. Returning to New York, I interviewed members of the Ukrainian diaspora here, generous people who fed me fragrant honey cakes and Christmas borsch with tiny dumplings called vushka. And then wrote angry letters when my publisher decided to subtitle the book: The Russian Cookbook.
***
My mother’s “super-quick vegetarian” borsch featured in Please to the Table, along with a handful of other borsch recipes. And by some strange twist of fate, almost three decades later it became a kind of salvation for her. After her darkest, most hopeless days under Donald Trump during the pandemic, she miraculously sprang back to life early in 2021 when she started teaching cooking on Zoom for a wonderful multicultural school called the League of Kitchens. For her class, my mother plumped for her Moscow veggie borsch accompanied by herb-and-garlic-smothered dinner rolls called pampushky. And as soon as her menu promising “iconic Russian dishes” went up on League of Kitchens’ website, an angry email arrived from a Ukrainian American journalist. “To say borsch is a Russian dish is not accurate and could be seen as offensive to a lot of people,” said the email. “There has been an ongoing fight over borsch in recent years as part of the backdrop to the continuing very real war between Russia and Ukraine.”
Indeed. The first real political flareup over borsch broke out in 2019, five years after Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine. That year the Russian Federation’s ministry of foreign affairs provocatively tweeted: “A timeless classic! #Borsch is one of Russia’s most famous & beloved #dishes & a symbol of traditional cuisine.” Ukrainian social media responded with outrage and scorn at this weaponising of soup. “As if stealing Crimea wasn’t enough,” seethed one commentator, “you had to go and steal borsch from Ukraine as well.” “Cultural appropriation!” cried Ukrainians interviewed on the subject. “[The Russians] will not take our borsch,” vowed Ievgen Klopotenko, a young activist chef in Kyiv, as he launched a crusade to have it inscribed into Unesco’s intangible cultural heritage list.
For her part, my passionately anti-Putin, anti-imperialist mother was pained by the Ukrainian journalist’s email. Cooking for her was always politically conscious. She garnished her classes with memories of Soviet repressions and the endless, humiliating food queues. She told of fleeing the hated Soviet regime at the age of 40 with only me and two suitcases and no right of return, of how she made her borsch in our bare apartment in alien, faraway Philadelphia. But she refused to assign a single identity to a dish that she, along with people across multiple borders, have been cooking for generations, have internalised as their own. “There are many types of borsch,” she would insist, grating her carrots and beetroots, “Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Karelian, diaspora Jewish – and, yes, yes, Ukrainian.”
Across the giant span of the USSR, she would further insist, borsch was a comfort food that connected people who shared not just the dishes but also the tragedies of Soviet fate – Stalin’s gulags, for instance, which didn’t spare a single group or ethnicity. Anyway, this was her, Larisa’s, recipe, full of her personal touches, resonant with so many memories.
I wasn’t about to argue with my mother about whose dish it “really” was. My years of work on this issue had left me wary of territory where gastronomy was entangled with nationbranding and profit. I was sceptical of the overused concept of cultural appropriation. I agreed with philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah that it casts cultural practices as something like corporate intellectual property. Whereas, in reality, as he put it: “All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture.”
* * *
Then 24 February 2022 happened. That night, my mother, my partner, Barry, and I sat in silence, gripped by grief, rage, despair – and utter disbelief – watching live CNN footage of Putin launching his full-scale invasion. There were air-raid sirens blaring in Kyiv that night, missile strikes, explosions rocking several other major Ukrainian cities. My mother was ashen-faced. She barely spoke, but I’m pretty sure she was flashing back to the sunny day of 22 June 1941, when she was seven and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was unleashed.
Over the following weeks the news brought a surreal split screen of two countries collapsing in different ways: Ukraine all smoke, haze and wreckage from Putin’s missiles and artillery; Russia ominously freezing itself back to the cold war USSR of my childhood – extreme censorship, toxic state-sponsored patriotism. As if one needed any further reminder that allegiances and identities can shift overnight, Soviet émigrés from our circles who considered themselves culturally Jewish-Russian-American started remembering all the family members they had in Ukraine. As did we.
My mum’s dad was from Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro); her entire maternal clan was from Odesa, the city of our sunburned summer vacations. Now in that city where she herself was born and lived very briefly, acquaintances who used to grimace at Ukrainian nationalism switched their social media feeds to Ukrainian and railed against Moscow’s brutality. Meanwhile, close friends of ours here, worldly people born in Soviet Ukraine, were posting diatribes savaging “Great Russian Culture” on Facebook. Some gloated over images of dead Russian soldiers, just boys, splayed in the snow. It was shocking to see; but deep down I shared their naked rage. Every Russian – including myself – seemed to be somehow complicit. I felt guilty for thinking in the imperialist language of Putin’s aggression, for the volumes by Pushkin and Tolstoy on my bookshelves. And, yes, for my previous thoughts about borsch.
If I started my national dish project comfortable with my own cosmopolitanism, I felt bereft now, a gaping emptiness where my mental happy places should be. In the US, years of Trumpism were poisoning the country that opened its doors to my mum and myself back in 1974. My ancestral homeland? A genocidal terrorist state. My younger brother and my father had died in Moscow the previous year, and now I couldn’t imagine ever returning to visit their graves.
It’s an evergreen cliche that in times of crisis the foods we grew up with provide a comforting sense of home and security, reconnect us to who we are, where we come from. But just thinking of borsch brought more heartache. Who owns borsch? The question hung in the air, accusatory. The soup of my childhood had become a symbol of Putin’s assault on Ukrainian land, culture and heritage, of his drive to plunder and obliterate Ukraine.
By April, Russia’s atrocities in Bucha were being uncovered, millions of Ukrainians had become refugees, and entire towns and cities lay in ruins. Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, a blond-haired ferocious Putinist, delivered a bizarre tirade about borsch. “It had to belong to just one people, just one nationality,” she ranted after Ukrainians insisted that borsch was their national dish. “But for it to be shared? … No! They didn’t want to compromise. This is exactly what we are talking about, xenophobia, nazism, extremism in all forms!” In the service of an unprovoked invasion, she was co-opting the time-honoured, benevolent notion that food should be shared.
By then my mother, who had been so traumatised by the early days of the war, had found in her borsch an emotional anchor and a new political meaning. Together with the League of Kitchens she was using her Zoom classes to raise money for Ukraine, to speak out in our local media, even on Japanese television, against Putin’s horror show. The struggle transformed her. At 88, she became a modest, heartfelt part of the global “stand with Ukraine” movement, where borsch was no longer just soup but a fundraising force and a solidarity symbol.
“Anyone who cooks borsch today gets closer to us,” declared Klopotenko, the young Kyiv chef. In London, my friend Olia Hercules, a brilliant Ukrainian food writer turned crusader, started the Cook for Ukraine drive with her Russian émigré colleague Alissa Timoshkina, raising more than £2m and boosting the profiles of Ukrainian culture and food. In New York, iconic East Village restaurant Veselka became an activism hub, with all its borsch profits going to Ukrainian charities. Soon the social media of my food friends all over the world was a tide of blueyellow flags, of varenyky dumplings and stuffed cabbage – and the same borsch and pampushky my mom made for her class.
My mother now spoke about borsch with a newfound authority and moral clarity. It didn’t matter who exactly “invented” the soup, she insisted. What was crucial was how borsch figured in anational narrative. And for Ukrainians under attack, it was a powerful symbol of unity. “Borsch,” she told one radio interviewer, “stands for home, generosity, the richness of land, and family ties … And all these things are now being taken away from Ukrainians.”
This was pretty much Unesco’s justification for an unprecedented emergency move to fast-track the cultural heritage application that had been submitted back in 2019. On 1 July 2022, day 128 of the invasion – as Russian missiles killed more than 20 people near Odesa – Unesco declared the culture of Ukrainian borsch an “intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding”.
“Victory in the war for borsch is ours!” Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko posted on Telegram: “Remember and be sure: We will win this war like we did the war for borsch.”
* * *
Late that summer, six months into Russia’s assault, I called Aurora Ogorodnyk, a food researcher in Lviv, who is writing a book about borsch with anthropologist Marianna Dushar. I wanted to ask for her thoughts on the dish as a Ukrainian national symbol, a role supercharged by Putin’s invasion.
“But borsch has long been symbolically important for us,” Aurora said. “We cook it for baptisms, weddings and funerals, we serve it in public communal pots during political protests – we even prepare it in dried form as rations for our soldiers, since 2014.” She paused, then added simply: “It’s who we are, our DNA. Red like our blood. And now Ukrainians eat it when they return to their ruined cities and villages.”
I’d met Aurora in the sunny Before era, at an international food conference. Now, she said, she was mostly at home in Lviv in western Ukraine, well away from the major fighting in the country’s south and east, yet always under threat of a missile strike. “Daily life goes on here,” she told me, sounding eerily calm, “but with the ever-present backdrop of a sudden air raid … the realisation that any moment you, too, can be killed.”
I wondered if perhaps now wasn’t the right moment to talk about soup, while civilians were being slaughtered and cities destroyed?
“No, now is the moment!” Aurora said. “To finally banish those Russian/ Soviet colonialist optics. Because it was fine having us as funny, folksy Ukrainians with our borsch and our salo [lard] when we were part of the USSR, which Russia controlled. But once we began to assert our independence, they decided to remind us, no, borsch doesn’t belong to you, actually.
“So borsch, is also an emblem of separation for us,” she said. “A red line where we cut them off and say enough to colonialism.”
There were a thousand more things I planned to ask Aurora. But instead, I suddenly found myself profusely apologising. Apologising for narcissistically going on about the guilt I was feeling, my own rage at the Russians, my loss of identity, my sheepishness for not yet learning Ukrainian and having to speak Russian to her.
With quiet authority, Aurora offered me a way forward. “I understand your rage, I share it, Anya. And when you’re far away it’s easy to get engulfed by despair. But all you need is a moment of reflection – just one. Then stop dwelling on hatred and guilt. Spread love and compassion through your cooking and writing.
“And really,” she added. “How is any of this your personal fault?”
At the end I asked Aurora if she believed Russians and Ukrainians would ever eat borsch together again. There was a long silence. Finally, she replied: “Not until the Ukrainians who win this war and the Russians who lose it are long gone.”
So where, then, was my guilt in all this? Hanging up after speaking to Aurora, I thought again of a poem, the savagely offensive verse lamenting Ukraine’s independence by the poet Joseph Brodsky, exiled Jewish–Russian Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate. The one where he promises that on their deathbeds, Ukrainians will forsake the “bullshit” of their national 19th-century poet Taras Shevchenko for Pushkin; the one where he wants to spit in Ukraine’s great river, the Dnieper. Brodsky wrote this in 1992, when he was living in the US, and embittered by Ukraine’s splitting away from Russia. He never published it, though he read it in public, just twice. Recently, it had been resurfacing in conversations about Russian imperialist arrogance.
“I think I need to decolonise borsch from myself,” I texted Aurora. “To stop thinking of owning it because of my Soviet-Russian personal history.” Aurora texted back some kind words in Ukrainian. The tension I felt during our conversation lifted a little.
* * *
On a stormy evening in August, two old friends arrived at my apartment in Queens with an armful of sumptuous marigolds. Andrei explained their Ukrainian name: “Chornobryvtsi –darkbrowed, meaning beautiful.”
“On the drive over,” his wife, Toma, said, “they perfumed our car with the scent of Ukrainian summer.” Later, I learned that Ukrainians plant marigolds by their houses to ward off the evil eye and misfortune.
Toma and Andrei are from Kyiv and live in New Jersey, and we hadn’t seen them for months. Since the invasion, Andrei – a documentary film-maker whose works include an account of Ukraine’s Orange revolution of 2004 – had been posting on Facebook with such raw anti-Russian passion, I wasn’t sure if they’d want to see me again. In one post he talked about how his hatred, at first an “acute disease with fever, curses and wishes for a painful death to you know who”, had become “a chronic condition, always with me, day, morning, evening. And, of course, in my dreams.”
Deeply worried about them, sheepishly I had emailed my sympathies, and repeatedly suggested getting together. Andrei would thank me for “reaching out” and leave it at that.
But now they were here, looking festive with their Ukrainian flowers and blue-yellow Ukraine solidarity bracelets. We were overjoyed to see them.
I had thought long and hard about what borsch I would serve for this occasion, brought about by such wrenching circumstances. To decolonise borsch, to make it truly Ukrainian, I rejected all the recipes I knew as a Soviet and postSoviet Russian. For days I researched the soup in Ukrainian, struggling with Google’s translations at first, then eventually easing into this language once so close to mine. What I found was a trove of regional recipes, recipes that now read like an atlas of violence.
Here was borsch (“prunes obligatory”) from Vinnytsia, the west-central city with a long Jewish history, where on a sunny July day Russian rockets killed 23 civilians going about their daily routines. There was a borsch based on dried fish from Mykolaiv, an industrial port city bombarded by Russians for months on end; there was a Tatar borsch with lamb, quince and corn from Crimea. I discovered borsch aphorisms and cartoons, borsch proverbs and jokes, borsch poems newly composed in the noise of this war, personal borsch recipes triumphantly named for places where Ukrainians repelled Russian aggressors.
Sifting through all these, I would think of something Marianna, Aurora’s co-author, told me. “Borsch isn’t so much a recipe as a national idea,” she said, “an idea that all Ukrainians carry inside them. Borsch develops and changes – and it changes us in the process.” In my own way, I felt that borsch was changing me, too.
Toma and Andrei’s eyes grew wide at my opening dish: a chilled borsch, for which I’d fermented the beet kvass myself, as it was done centuries ago, then added sour cherries and rhubarb for a classic fruity, tart flavour. “In Kyiv,” said Toma, “we’d use fresh gooseberries for that sour effect.”
Just six months ago we were the same people, I reflected sadly, as my mother passed around her chopped liver, herring paté and a garlicky eggplant dip – Jewish appetisers iconic to her native Odesa. We were all former Soviets turned émigrés, Russian speakers of mixed ethnic backgrounds who’d read Pushkin, had the same cultural compass. “And now the invasion has divided us,” Andrei continued my thought, his voice going quiet, “into those living in a daily personal hell, and the compassionate bystanders … who’ll never truly understand our trauma.”
Toma and Andrei had spent the past months waking up and going to bed checking the news and updates from their families in Kyiv. Toma has two sisters back home. Andrei’s sister had suffered such severe depression and panic attacks she was in Germany receiving treatment. “It helped to get a break from the air raids,” said Andrei. “But she can’t wait to get back to her kids and grandkids.”
I brought out my second borsch, to the table my mother had decorated with sunflowers and a mini Ukrainian flag. It’s shocking pink, with blended-in sour cream, dusky with broth infused with smoked pork. It has no potatoes or cabbage and is meant to be sipped from cups at weddings. Nobody at the table had tasted anything like it. The recipe had been taught me by Maria, a recent refugee from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west of the country. “It will deRussify you!” Maria promised, only half joking.
Inevitably the conversation turned back to our changed identities. Andrei – of Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian background, just like borsch, I noted – went to a Ukrainian school but now deeply regrets not doing a better job reading Ukrainian literature in its original language. Toma was born in Dresden (ex– German Democratic Republic) but had lived in Kyiv since childhood. Though her entire family is ethnically Russian, her sister back home can’t bear the sound of Russian any more, can’t look at Russians.
As they talked, I thought of the dream I’d been having for weeks, one where I sit in my childhood Moscow apartment drinking sugary tea with my departed father and brother – from which I’d wake up feeling homeless, sundered from my past. I wanted to tell them about it, but now Toma was proposing a toast.
“To borsch,” she offered. “It’s the colour of pomegranate, bright as a Ukrainian folk song.”
“To eating it often with people we love,” my mother put in.
Andrei raised his shot glass of Polish vodka. “Borsch is a generous dish,” he declared, “a Ukrainiandish, even if other people might claim it. I say: leave it to Ukrainians, please, and after they win this war they’ll invite the rest of the world to the table.”
“But notmembers of the Russian Federation,” Toma added tartly.
And we drank.
This is an edited extract from National Dish by Anya von Bremzen, published by Penguin Press US on 20 June. It will be published by Pushkin Press in the UK in September.
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