Veggies Get Rare Boost in Moscow : Animal rights: Activists face a tough task in turning the Russians away from beloved meat.

On a warm, sunny day at high noon, 17-year-old Ira Belobragina launched her career as a political activist.

Proudly bearing a platter piled high with foil-wrapped vegetable burgers, Belobragina stepped onto grassy Pushkin Square on Friday and led a parade of a dozen animal-rights enthusiasts through clusters of bewildered picnickers.

With a Russian teen-ager dressed like Leo Tolstoy, the 19th-Century writer who endorsed vegetarianism, and an American coordinator from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals decked out like a cow, Moscow’s first animal-rights demonstration attracted quite a few stares--and just as many snickers.

The free soybean and vegetable burgers were a hit, especially with the barefoot beggars who roam Pushkin Square across the street from Moscow’s McDonald’s restaurant. The colorful postcards depicting wide-eyed cows were popular. And the small pins distributed by a handful of teen-age activists became instant collectibles.

But as for the message, most Russians weren’t sure quite what to make of it.

“I don’t really understand what they’re doing in those costumes,” Sergei Vasiliev, 19, said as he unwrapped his veggie burger away from the noisy knot of onlookers clamoring for freebies in Pushkin Square, a traditional forum for human-rights demonstrations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Clutching a large McDonald’s bag filled with takeout burgers and fries, 34-year-old Panta Zangaladze of Georgia pushed his way past the demonstrators, who held signs proclaiming, “Tolstoy Says Forget Meat, Stick With Wheat.”

“I don’t get what they want us to do,” Zangaladze said. “We’ll have to stop eating meat soon enough when supplies run out, so we might as well enjoy it now while we have the chance.”

Organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a Washington-based organization with 250,000 members, the hourlong demonstration aimed to educate Russians about the health hazards associated with high-fat diets and to introduce the concept of animal rights, according to Dan Matthews, the group’s special projects director.

Yet, as the volunteers themselves admitted, bringing vegetarianism to Russia will require completely changing the national attitude toward food.

In most households, meat is considered the centerpiece of a meal; fried beef cutlets may be served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A favorite snack food is kolbasa, or kielbasa, smoked sausage that sometimes contains more fat than meat. And, especially in Ukraine, smoked animal fat is a delicacy.

“I wanted to become a vegetarian, but my parents said that men absolutely must eat meat,” complained Denis Derechinsky, a teen-ager who hooked up with the American organization through a local environmental group.

The American activists’ strategy of emphasizing the gruesome aspects of animal slaughter may not scare Russian consumers, who are accustomed to wandering through farmers’ markets filled with bloody cow carcasses, severed boar heads and shriveled suckling pigs.

“I sort of agree that we shouldn’t kill animals, but then again, why eat plants?--they’re also living,” Vasiliev argued as he watched the volunteers earnestly explaining vegetarianism to passersby. “Also, it’s too expensive to just eat vegetables and fruit. And with political instability and the possibility of hunger this winter, people don’t have time to worry about their diets.”

In the end, despite these obstacles, the animal-rights group did win some converts.

A dozen of the teen-age volunteers, relishing their newfound roles as activists, have eagerly begun planning their next publicity stunt: an anti-fur demonstration outside the Bolshoi Theater when the season opens this fall.

And Andrei, a 22-year-old who said he has always enjoyed his lunchtime hamburger, began having second thoughts after watching American Julia Sloan cavort in a cuddly cow costume.

“I have to confess,” he said reluctantly, “I do pity the cows.”