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Hinduism in Russia

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History

The history of Hinduism in Russia dates back to at least the 16th century. When Astrakhan was conquered in 1556, the small Indian community became part of the Moscow state.

By the early 17th century, Indian merchants, mainly Multanis and Shikarpuris from Sindh and Punjab, had established a permanent settlement in Astrakhan. Tsar Michael Fedorovich (r. 1613–1645) encouraged them to build an Indian dvor (“Indian Court”), a walled compound containing living quarters, warehouses, and a small Hindu temple. These merchants, described by travellers such as Adam Olearius, Peter Pallas, and George Forster, practised daily rituals before images of Vishnu and Kali, lit lamps, performed ablutions in the Volga, and celebrated festivals such as Diwali. In 1683, the Tsar granted the Astrakhan Hindus official permission to cremate their dead outside the city, making it one of the earliest legal recognitions of Hindu rites in Russia.

In the early eighteenth century, the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great, met the head of the Astrakhan Hindus and, at their request, asked the Russian Senate to issue a law protecting Hindu beliefs. This was the first law in Russia that protected a foreign creed.

By the mid-eighteenth century, observers such as the Prussian naturalist Peter Simon Pallas noted the presence of hundreds of Multani Vaiṣṇava Hindu merchant families at the mouth of the Volga River, where their temple in the Indiiskii dvor remained active. From the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Astrakhan functioned as a northern outpost of Hinduism in Eurasia, maintaining continuous worship under official Russian tolerance before the community’s decline as caravan trade through Bukhara and Iran waned.

In 1971 A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), introduced it to Russia. In 1988, ISKCON was first registered as a religion. Later, it was re-registered in 1998. In the same year, there were 120 Krishna communities in Russia.

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PinyinRomanization scheme for Standard ChineseHindusAdherents of HinduismTraditional Chinese charactersStandardized set of Chinese charactersLiteral translationWord-for-word translation of a textReligionSocial-cultural systemTheologyStudy of the nature of deities and religious beliefs