In Their Own Words 2 by The National Archives

Author:The National Archives
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844865239
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Scoring points with potatoes

Raisa Gorbacheva’s potato recipe letter

19 JULY 1985

The mid-1980s was a time of ratcheting Cold War tensions: of the ‘evil empire’; Operation Able Archer; Olympic Games’ boycotts; and the ever-present fear of mutually assured destruction. However, while news of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project was dominating the airwaves, wags at the British Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food may have been forgiven for thinking of UK-Soviet relations in the context of ‘Spudnik’.

Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet premier in March 1985. Prior to this, in the previous December, he had led a parliamentary delegation to the UK during which a cautiously optimistic Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found him a man with whom she could do business. The Soviet delegation was hosted at the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, a sixteenth-century manor house set at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in a green corner of Buckinghamshire, forty miles north-west of London.

During lunch one day, Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa – a lecturer at Moscow State University – apparently became engaged in conversation about potato recipes with the British government Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Michael Jopling. The conversation clearly stuck with Mrs Gorbacheva as she wrote to Jopling months later recalling his somewhat attitude to her insistence that there were three hundred Byelorussian recipes for the humble potato. Determined to prove this to be the case, she vowed to send Jopling evidence in the form of a cookery book on her return to Moscow.

This she did, although in her letter the Soviet first lady had to confess an error, writing: ‘My apologies for being somewhat inaccurate, in fact there are five hundred, rather than three hundred, recipes to cook potatoes.’ A cookery book was also dispatched to Whitehall. Some weeks later, Ivor Llewelyn, at the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, wrote to his Foreign and Commonwealth Office colleague Len Appleyard to triumphantly declare: ‘We have the book … it is in Russian.’ Llewelyn continued, offering: ‘If you have anyone who reads Russian and has a fondness for potatoes, we would be happy to lend it.’ The correspondence even caught the attention of Margaret Thatcher as her private secretary, Charles Powell, noted: ‘Prime Minister. Fascinating evidence of a new style!’ Sadly, the official record doesn’t reveal whether anybody accepted the offer to borrow the cookery book. However, it is no longer with the original file so perhaps a willing taker with a fondness for potatoes and a proficiency in Russian was indeed found!

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