Tolstoy Never Ate a Thing

In eighteen ninety-one, Leo Tolstoy visited a slaughterhouse. A month later he sat down to write an essay he called "The First Step" — a meditation on restraint, on luxury, and on where a person's moral effort actually begins. Giving up meat, for Tolstoy, wasn't a diet, and it wasn't pity for animals for pity's sake. It was the first, easiest rung on a long ladder of self-discipline. The essay appeared in eighteen ninety-two, and it quickly became something like a bible for the vegetarian movement, in Russia and well beyond it.

And that movement, it turns out, was surprisingly organized — and thoroughly urban. In December nineteen hundred, a Vegetarian Society opened in St. Petersburg, led by a physician, Alexander Zelenkov. Eight years later, in February nineteen-oh-nine, a sister society opened in Moscow. These weren't hobby clubs meeting in someone's living room — they were real city institutions, with their own dining halls, lecture series, and printed journals.

And there were a lot of dining halls. St. Petersburg had nine of them — the largest stood on Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main boulevard, with others on Kazanskaya Street and along the Fontanka river. Moscow's best-known one was on Nikitsky Boulevard, and the attendance numbers still surprise: by nineteen fourteen, that single Moscow vegetarian dining hall had been visited six hundred forty-three thousand times. This wasn't a fringe experiment run by a handful of eccentrics — it was thousands of city dwellers making a deliberate food choice, day after day.

The movement had its own press, too. In January nineteen-oh-nine, in the city of Chisinau, the first issue of a journal called "Vegetarian Review" came out, founded by the publisher Joseph Perper together with his brother. It ran for nearly seven years, later moved to Kyiv, and counted among its contributors names still recognized today: the painter Ilya Repin, the writer Sholem Aleichem. In nineteen thirteen, a St. Petersburg woman named Olga Zelenkova published Russia's first vegetarian cookbook, with a title that said it all — "I Eat No One."

So there's the story, in short: long before this century, giving up meat in Russia wasn't the quirk of a few loners. It was a whole way of life, complete with dining halls and magazines — centered, fittingly enough, on Tolstoy's own estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and on perfectly ordinary city streets around it.

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