The House Article | Recipes for disaster: Winston Churchill’s dinners with Joseph Stalin

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at dinner in Tehran on 30 November 1943 (piemags/ww2archive/Alamy)

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Over the course of the Second World War, Winston Churchill would have a series of meals with Joseph Stalin. They were potentially difficult affairs, encounters between an empire-supporting Tory from aristocratic British stock and a Soviet revolutionary from a peasant family, conducted through a translator. Both men had huge egos and were prickly and sensitive to insults. 

The meals, among other things, are charted by Giles Milton in his book The Stalin Affair. The first, in August 1942 in Moscow, was a 19-course Kremlin banquet. Relations between the two men were frosty: earlier in the visit, Stalin had complained that he wasn’t getting enough support and that the US and Britain were leaving the USSR to fight the Nazis alone. Churchill had replied that Britain had been fighting the Nazis when Stalin had been sucking up to them.

Now Stalin gave a toast to Churchill referring to the Gallipoli campaign of the previous war, a brainchild of Churchill’s, as suffering from “gross stupidities in concept and execution”. It took all the skill of the British ambassador to Moscow, Archibald Clark Kerr, to stop the prime minister from leaving Moscow immediately.

A year later, there was another dinner in Tehran, marking Churchill’s 69th birthday. The British were hosting and, according to Milton, they wanted to intimidate Stalin, “They thought that the best way to do that was to pull out the full array of British etiquette.” The table was laid with an array of cutlery for the multiple courses. When the Soviet leader took his place at the table, he anxiously asked the British interpreter for advice on etiquette. But if Stalin was worried he would embarrass himself, the good news was that another member of his team would suffer far worse at the meal. 

The dessert was a ‘Persian lantern’, a huge tower of ice cream, several feet high. It arrived as the speeches began, and the staff were reluctant to interrupt the great men in order to serve.

But in the heat of the evening, the pudding had begun to melt. The British general Hastings Ismay recorded what followed with some delight. “The laws of gravity could be denied no longer,” he wrote. “The pudding descended like an avalanche.” The man caught in this was Stalin’s interpreter, Pavlov. “In a moment, ice cream was oozing out of his hair, his ears, his shirt, even his shoes.” Knowing that there were worse things that could befall someone in Stalin’s service, Pavlov continued interpreting his master’s words without missing a beat. 

They wanted to intimidate Stalin. ‘They thought that the best way to do that was to pull out the full array of British etiquette’

In 1944, Churchill was back in Moscow, and invited Stalin to a banquet at the British embassy. Clark Kerr pulled out all the stops: there was white fish poached in wine and cold suckling pig with mayonnaise. For this trip, Churchill had a secret mission: he had brought with him what he called his “naughty document”, a plan to divide up eastern Europe and the Balkan states into British and Soviet spheres of influence: the USSR would get Romania and Bulgaria, Britain would get Greece, and Hungary and Yugoslavia would be split evenly.

The evening was a huge success, culminating in the guests gathering on the balcony to watch a gun salute marking a recent Soviet victory. Churchill was delighted. Stalin had agreed to his plan. But that gun salute told the real story: the USSR was happy to let the British believe what they wanted, because the Red Army was in eastern Europe, and wouldn’t be sharing it with anyone. It would be some months before Churchill realised that there are limits to the powers of banquet diplomacy.