On December 1, 1901, the first vegetarian society in Russia was founded in St. Petersburg; jokingly, it was called “Neither Fish nor Meat.” The society was headed by Alexander Petrovich Zelenkov, a physician and surgeon. In 1913, his wife published the first vegetarian cookbook titled “I Eat Nobody.” The book contained three hundred and sixty-five menu options. In 1904, the society began publishing a print magazine, “Vegetarian Herald.”
Later, canteens appeared as well, in 24 cities of the empire: Moscow had 6, St. Petersburg had 5, and Kyiv had 7.
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky described how Ilya Repin took him to such an exotic place: “There you had to stand in line for a long time—for bread, for dishes, and for some kind of tin tokens… The main lures in this vegetarian canteen were pea cutlets, cabbage, and potatoes. A two-course lunch cost thirty kopecks.”
Repin himself, of course, was delighted: “The canteen is run in an exemplary manner; in the entryway, the cloakroom attendants are not allowed to take any payment. And this has a serious point, given the special influx here of underfunded students… The walls of all the rooms are hung with photographic portraits of Leo Tolstoy, of various sizes and in different turns and poses. And at the very end of the rooms, on the right—in the reading room—hangs a huge portrait of L. N. Tolstoy, life-size, on a gray dappled horse, riding through the Yasnaya Polyana forest… The selection of dishes is quite sufficient, but that is not the main thing; the main thing is that whatever you take, the dishes are so tasty, fresh, and nourishing that the words slip off your tongue: why, this is a feast!”
Moscow became the center of vegetarianism in 1909, when the “Moscow Vegetarian Society” was founded; it lasted until 1929.
In the first post-revolutionary years, vegetarianism continued to be popular. The old canteens kept operating; one new one even opened—in a mansion on Petrovka. It was called “Rest from Meat.” This was exactly the place visited by the newlyweds Kalachev, characters in Ilf and Petrov’s novel “The Twelve Chairs.”
But gradually vegetarians began to be regarded with suspicion. Not surprising, since suspicion was aroused by anything that stood out even slightly from the plain mainstream trends. The canteens were renamed “dietetic” (as the word was spelled then), and then closed altogether or squeezed out by rent. Societies were dissolved, their activists arrested. Later, vegetarianism was banned as harmful food unsuitable for the Soviet person.
In 1951, in Volume 7 of the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, “Varioloid – Vibrator,” it was officially stated: “Vegetarianism, based on false hypotheses and ideas, has no adherents in the Soviet Union.”