Since the 18th century, Russian chefs have adopted many techniques of French haute cuisine and combined them with the local culinary tradition.

In particular, the use of high quality meat cuts, such as various cutlets, steaks, escalopes and suprêmes became widespread in the 19th century, and a number of original dishes involving such components were developed in Russia at that time.

The latter name appears in the pre- and post-revolutionary Russian literature (in cookbooks as well as in fiction) since the beginning of the 20th century and is usually mentioned as a common restaurant dish.

[10][22][23][24][25][26] The recipe in the classical Russian cookery textbook The Practical Fundamentals of the Cookery Art by Pelageya Alexandrova-Ignatieva [ru] (which had eleven editions between 1899 and 1916) includes a complex stuffing similar to quenelle (a mixture of minced meat, in this case the rest of the meat of the chicken, and cream) but with butter added.

[27] The recipe is preceded by a similar one for "hazel grouse cutlets à la Maréchale" with a quenelle and truffle stuffing.

[34] Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives, the most successful Russian cookbook of the 19th century, has included since its first edition in 1861 an elaborate recipe for "hazel grouse à la Maréchale" stuffed with Madeira sauce, portobello mushrooms and truffles.

[35] The main difference between the old time côtelette de volaille and the modern chicken Kiev is that the elaborate stuffings of the former are replaced by butter.

The Russian Tea Room Cookbook notes that chicken Kiev was "most likely ... a creation of the great French chef Carême at the Court of Alexander I.

"[41] Marie-Antoine Carême spent just several months of the year 1818 in St. Petersburg,[42] but made a profound impact on Russian cuisine in this short time.

[16] The recipe of the Russian côtelette de volaille is not present in Carême's major work mentioned above, but his "fowl fillet à la Maréchale" could have served as the starting point for the further development of such dishes.

Some Russian sources attribute the creation of this dish (or of its precursor) to Nicolas Appert, French confectioner and chef, best known as the inventor of airtight food preservation.

The cookbook by Alexandrova-Ignatieva (including editions before and after 1912) describes indeed Novo-Mikhailovsky cutlets and mentions that they were invented in the club near the Mikhailovsky palace.

[52] An early reference of "Kiev cutlets from chicken or veal" is found in the Cookery Digest (1915), a collection of recipes which were published in the Moscow Journal for Housewives in 1913–1914.

The book demanded renaming of many traditional restaurant dishes to replace the (mostly French-style) "bourgeois" names with simple "proletarian" forms.

[54] This program was not realised immediately (at least not completely), and its successor, The Directory of Apportionments for Catering (1940), published by the Soviet Ministry of Food Industry, still included the traditional names.

[56][57][58] As a result of this policy, the names de volaille and à la Maréchale disappeared from menus of Soviet restaurants.

The "old-style" name "cutlet de volaille Kiev-style" was occasionally mentioned in some post-World War II Soviet fiction books.

[25][59] In particular, in a short story This Is Not Written In A Cookbook (1947) by Yevgeny Vorobyov, a Soviet soldier and a former chef in a Moscow noble hotel explains to his comrade in arms, that "cutlets de volaille are made for two tastes.

[67] Since the end of the 1940s or beginning of the 1950s, chicken Kiev became a standard fare in Soviet high class restaurants, in particular in the Intourist hotel chain serving foreign tourists.