On 23 August 2007 Russian animal-rights activists and vegetarians said farewell to an outstanding individual, Tatyana Nikolaevna Pavlova (12 March 1931-21 August 2007), founder of the Russian vegetarian movement and the person who laid the philosophical basis for the movement for animal rights in Russia.
Her name is known world-wide among animal rights supporters. Her books, which influenced more than one generation of vegetarians, literally revolutionised our consciousness, forcing people to re- think their attitudes to the living world, inspiring them to join the struggle to liberate the creatures with fewest rights on this planet – non-human animals. Tatyana Pavlova was able to articulate the idea that the future spiritual development of mankind cannot take place within an anthropocentric model of society based on enslaving all other species to satisfy our own needs.
In 1989 Tatyana Pavlova founded the first Russian vegetarian society to come into existence since the 1917 Revolution; in 1992 she created two closely allied movements, the Centre for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (CETA), which aimed to combat the exploitation of animals for food, fur and leather, in scientific experimentation and in entertainment, and the Scientific Medical Centre (SMC), which propagated vegetarianism as a means to healthy living and disease prevention. Thanks to research carried out at SMC, scientists officially had to admit – after long years of silence on this subject – the advantages of vegetarianism and in the mid-1990s the SMC was included in the Russian Ministry of Health’s list of institutions encouraging healthy living.
Read more of Tatyana’s accomplishments here.
