Was Lenin a Vegetarian?

[Redistribute the Rep]

I remember reading he was somewhere and tried searching for it but couldn't find anything except this weird quote:



I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practising moral self-purification; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.

Any other well known vegetarian leftists?

[Slavic]

Lenin sounds like a hipster.

[motion denied]

what a dork

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Lenin was actually mocking the Russian intelligentsia with that quote:

'The contradictions in Tolstoy’s works, views, doctrines, in his school, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remark ably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the “Tolstoyan”, i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: “I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.” On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, “resist not evil” with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i. e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism. '

I recall Lenin describing how Vera Zasulich used to eat steaks before they were completely cooked in Switzerland; if he had any objection to eating meat, he didn't voice it.