Ausgehend vom soziologischen Konzept des Movement intellectual und Michel Foucaults Konzept der pastoralen Macht sowie unter Berücksichtigung der Medien wie Buchdrucks, Post, öffentliche Vorträge und Eisenbahn bei der Verbreitung der vegetarischer Ideen und Praktiken in Europa untersucht dieser Artikel Joseph Perpers intellektuelle und praktische Bemühungen zur Förderung der vegetarischen Bewegung. Die Analyse zeigt, wie Perper zu einem herausragenden Intellektuellen der Bewegung wurde. Sie beleuchtet auch, welche Faktoren das historiografische und populäre Bild des Vegetarismus im zaristischen Russland und in Teilen Osteuropas beeinflusst haben. Dabei kommt den Assoziationen mit dem Tolstojismus große Bedeutung zu.

Drawing on the sociological concept of the movement intellectual and Michel Foucault’s concept of pastoral power, this chapter explores Joseph Perper’s intellectual praxis in promoting the vegetarian movement in the fin-de-siecle Romanov Empire. The analysis highlights several incarnations of Perper as a movement intellectual: as a meaning-maker and inventor of a vegetarian tradition; as a public promoter and educator of vegetarianism and its reform agenda; and as an international liaison for vegetarian efforts. An admirer of Leo Tolstoy and a proponent of ethical vegetarianism, Perper, as the research findings indicate, played a significant role in constructing a Tolstoy-centered image of the vegetarian activism in the Romanov Empire. Eventually, this constructed image of vegetarianism, characterized by strong associations with Tolstoy, obscured the actual polyphony of justifications for vegetarianism in the late imperial period.

The late Romanov Empire experienced a series of global transformations. New scientific fields such as nutrition, veterinary studies, and zootechnics were emerging, slaughtering processes were industrialized, livestock commodified, and agriculture commercialized – all of which served to intensify public and scientific debates over optimal diets. This article proposes meatification as an analytical framework for examining the global developments within the context of the late Romanov Empire. By analyzing the entanglement of livestock commodification, agricultural modernization, and dietary reform on the one hand, and evolving knowledge regimes alongside Russia’s imperial pathologies on the other, meatification works as a conceptual lens to unravel the logic and rationale behind the growing anxieties over meat in human diets, as expressed across diverse contexts in the Empire. Expanding the historical geographies of meatification to include the Romanov Empire opens new avenues for scholarly discussion of the “connected histories of empire,” and the role of non-Western empires in the imperial food regime.

Acknowledging that Eastern European and Russian consumerism not only adopted and aligned Western attitudes, but also developed own ways of negotiating consumption and through that their own lifestyle in modernity, the chapter launches the conceptual framework of Consuming and Advertising by deconstructing prevalent images of nearly non-existent consumerism there. By the turn to twentieth century, different consumption patterns were negotiated differently across these societies, even if products were similar. The establishment of Soviet power can be outlined as an anti-consumerism project, but particular socialist forms of consumption and advertisements emerged, spreading the image of the “socialist world” and socialist ideas of consuming and advertising. These forms deeply shaped everyday life, since consumer goods were considered by the people as the most important part of the promised “good life”, consumption and advertisement were instrumentalized to proof that promise. Hence, the chapter considers consumption as a cultural practice that reflects values and norms, but also political attitudes, and tool of soft power, while advertisements want to trigger the desires of the consumers. Both consumption and advertisement represent and trigger habitus and self-perception in a society and were used to mobilize the population in favor of the state and nation.

This book explores Eastern European consumer cultures in the twentieth century, taking a comparative perspective and conceptualizing the peculiarities of consumption in the region. Contributions cover lifestyles and marketing strategies in imperial contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; urban consumer cultures in the Interwar Period; and consumer and advertising cultures in the Soviet Union and its satellite republics. It traces the development of marketing throughout the century, and the changes in society brought about by democratization and the 'Americanization' of consumption. Taken together, the essays gathered here make a valuable contribution to our understanding of consumption and advertising in the region.