Pavel Syutkin, a longtime Moscow Times columnist and historian of Russian cuisine, was sentenced in Moscow yesterday to six years in prison. His “crime” is all too common in Putin’s Russia: spreading what the authorities call “fake news” about the Russian military.

For years, Pavel and his wife, Olga, had written a weekly column that highlighted the richness of Russian cuisine for The Moscow Times. They continued to write it even after we were forced into exile in the Netherlands in 2022. 

I must confess that after our move to Amsterdam, I regularly suggested to our editor-in-chief that we stop publishing the Syutkins’ columns. As a Russian, I assumed that after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no one would want to read about Russian cuisine, much less cook it. But our American editor showed me the readership figures, which proved that these columns remained very popular.........

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