Buddhism in the Post-Soviet Religious Marketplace

On Sunday, January 18, 1998, an unusual sight greeted Muscovites strolling down Ostozhenka Street, not far from the Kremlin. A group of Buddhist lamas, dressed in their saffron robes, were gathering on the grounds of the recently reopened Russian Orthodox Convent of the Conception. Led by Nimazhap Il’ich Iliukhinov (b. 1963), the abbot of the “Dharma” Buddhist community in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude, the lamas were holding a congress in Moscow’s Public School No. 36—which still stood on the convent’s territory—to establish a new national religious organization, the Spiritual Directorate of Buddhists of Russia. According to a contemporary press report, two elderly Russian women eyed the lamas suspiciously, spat on the ground, and crossed themselves. “Not Aum Shinrikyo again!” the women muttered, mistaking the lamas for adherents of the Japanese new religious movement that had gained a following in Russia before launching a deadly nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.1