ISKCON Moscow Temple (Begovaya Street)

ISKCON’s first temple in Moscow was established in 1990-1991 in a two-story house allocated near Begovaya metro station, at the point when the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed devotees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) — the Gaudiya Vaishnava movement founded in the West by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada — to move freely in and out of Russia for the first time, making it the first Hindu temple in the USSR. Kirtiraja Dasa headed ISKCON Russia at the time of the temple’s founding and asked a fellow devotee, Vaidyanatha (later known as Bhakti Vijnana Goswami), to take over leadership of the Moscow temple, though Vaidyanatha chose instead to return to Sweden to continue translating religious texts.

The temple’s subsequent history has been unusually unsettled. Russian-language sources describe the original Begovaya-area building, constructed in 1945, being demolished in June 2004 to make way for Moscow’s Third Transport Ring road. A replacement site on Leningradsky Prospekt near Khodynskoye Pole was allocated in 2003 and approved by the Moscow mayor in 2004, only to be rescinded in October 2005 following opposition from the Russian Orthodox Church. A further site was allocated in the Molzhaninovsky District, beyond the Moscow ring road near Sheremetyevo Airport, in 2006, with a ritual ceremony marking progress there in June 2012 — though it remains unconfirmed whether a permanent temple building was ever completed there, and the community may still be worshipping in temporary structures designed for around 200 people on Leningradsky Prospekt. The temple’s formal name is recorded elsewhere as Sri Sri Dayal Nitai Sacisuta.

Hinduism in Russia today includes both ISKCON’s Gaudiya Vaishnava community — estimated at around 10,000 Hare Krishna devotees in Moscow as of the mid-2000s, and reported by a temple president in 2017 to comprise some 180 ISKCON temples and spiritual centers nationwide — and a broader Hindu population of Indian, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, and Mauritian residents and migrants. The presence of Hindu communities in Russia is not a purely modern phenomenon: a 17th-century “Indian Court” in Astrakhan, on the Volga, is documented as having included a small Hindu temple alongside merchants’ living quarters and warehouses, reflecting a much older history of Hindu trading communities on Russian soil.