Published:
Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, December 25, 2011
Hindus and Krishna devotees
may be fighting a court battle in the Siberian city of Tomsk against a move to
ban the Bhagavad Gita, but their 40-year quest to find a foothold in Russia is
taking shape in the construction of a massive temple on Moscow's outskirts.
The Moscow Vedic Centre, as
the temple devoted to Krishna will be called, is coming up on a five-acre land
at Verskino village in Molzhaninovsky, close to the Sheremetyevo international
airport, Bhakti Vijnana Goswami, a Russian Iskcon monk who is visiting India,
told IANS in New Delhi.
The Moscow Vedic Centre is a
replacement for the original Krishna temple that acted as the centre of Iskcon
or International Society for Krishna Consciousness that has today spread to 80
cities in Russia and has over 50,000 active devotees.
The original temple, Goswami
said, was demolished in 2004 by the Moscow city government as it came in the
way of a new apartment building.
To compensate for the
demolished temple, the Moscow administration provided Iskcon an alternative
plot of land on Leningradsky Avenue, where the temple functions temporarily
till it moves into the Moscow Vedic Centre in late 2012.
"It is ironic that the
Russian capital is recognising our humanitarian service, while in another city
in the country, state prosecutors have filed a case to get Bhagavad Gita banned
in Russia," Sadhu Priya Das, an Iskcon devotee in Moscow, told IANS over
phone.
The history of ISKCON in
Russia is a story of extraordinary events, all demonstrating the unique destiny
Russia holds in the spiritual future of the world, according to Goswami, who is
spearheading the temple construction.
The story began in 1971. As
Leonid Brezhnev was consolidating his totalitarian rule in the erstwhile Soviet
Union, Iskcon founder Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada visited Moscow for five
days to meet Professor Kotovsky, a Soviet scholar of Hinduism.
"Though Prabhupada's
conversation with the Russian scholar was meaningful, the actual miracle was
his meeting with a single Russian youth, who was led to the spiritual leader's
hotel door to hear the message of Bhagavad Gita.
"Today, 40 years after
Prabhupada met with the young Russian, a mighty tree has taken root with close
to 50,000 practising Vaishnavas in Russia," Goswami said. In former Soviet
states that are part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, there are
55,000 more Iskcon members.
Today the Iskcon temple in
Moscow attracts 1,000 devotees a day on an average and 10,000 devotees, a
majority of them Russians, on Janmashtami, Lord Krishna's birthday.
Iskcon itself became a
recognised official religious organisation in the Soviet Union in 1988 after
then President Mikhail Gorbachov introduced Perestroika, a movement within the
Communist Party there for political restructuring. "The days of
persecution under the atheist Soviet government was over in 1988," Goswami
said.
Soon, in 1990, Moscow
authorities provided Iskcon a semi-dilapidated building at Begovaya for a
temple, which was later demolished in 2004 leading to the allotment of an
alternative land for the Moscow Vedic Centre.
"The alternative land in
lieu of the demolished temple came about in 2006, when Moscow's mayor and the
Delhi chief minister had signed a joint declaration in this regard," said
Goswami. A year later, the Moscow administration issued the necessary orders
for the construction of the Moscow Vedic Centre.
In November this year, Indian
President Pratibha Patil sent a message to the Iskcon when it observed 40 years
of its work in Russia.
"Over the past few
decades, Iskcon has played an important role in popularising the noble and
eternal message of the Srimad Bhagavad Gita and promoting spiritual harmony in
many foreign lands. It is a tribute to the resolute spirit of the followers of
Iskcon that they have sustained their presence in Russia for so many
decades," she said in her message.
The Tomsk city court is
scheduled to deliver Dec 28 its verdict in the case filed by the state
prosecutors for banning Bhagavad Gita and branding it as "extremist"
literature, after a deposition from the Russian human rights ombudsman.
