Russian vedism

The Russian Religion (Russian: Русская Религия), also termed Russian Vedism (Русский Ведизм), is one of the earliest doctrines of Rodnovery (Slavic Neopaganism) in Russia, founded in 1992 in Saint Petersburg by the psychologist and esoteric scientist Viktor Mikhaylovich Kandyba—revered as "Prophet Kandyba" within the movement—and his son Dimitry Viktorovich Kandyba. It is a monotheism based on Slavic heritage, and as such it has been compared to Ukrainian Sylenkoism. The concept of "Russian" in the name "Russian Religion" does not identify an ethnic identity, but a spiritual one, being used as a synonym of the concept of "Aryan".

Overview

Viktor M. Kandyba grew up in the Soviet Union, in an environment of Marxist–Leninist atheism which viewed religion as a merely political and social tool. He attended a naval school in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) and was possibly influenced by Viktor Bezverkhy, the founder of Peterburgian Vedism, who taught there in the 1970s. Kandyba graduated in psychology and studied esotericism. He claimed to be the descendant of a line of ancient Russian priests, what he named Vedic "ideologists" or samans (саман). Together with his son Dimitry Viktorovich, he became popular in Russia in the late 1980s for their studies about the psychological "culture of trance" and their practice of hypnosis which they claimed to be unbroken traditions of "Russian Vedism".

In the 1990s, Viktor Kandyba began to elaborate and disseminate his own doctrine of "Russian Religion", first systematically presented in his book History of the Russian Empire published in 1997. In the creation of the literature about the "Russian Religion", Kandyba collaborated with the academic historian Petr Zolin.