Letter from St. Petersburg Prabhupadanuga

Sundar Gopal Das: This is forwarded by His Grace Sriman Yugavatara rabhu who just received Harinam initiation by Skype. He is from St Petersburg, Russia.

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I was born in 1978. Srila Prabhupada came to Russia in 1971 and I was in a simple poor family. My parents are atheist like most people in Russia. In 2012 I'm divorced. My coworker brought in office Bhagavad-Gita. 

I was reading for half-year. After I found Iskcon program in Saint-Petersburg and began to chant 16 rounds and followed the 4 principles. I began to distribute books and held a preaching session with a group of beginners in my flat, being inspired by reading Srila Prabhupada's books. 

I went to India and did Parikrama of Vrindavan, Mayapur, Puri. On my return I continued to preach Krsna consciousness to a group of beginners. It was hard years. At time my siksa guru was Achuatma prabhu (now GBC of Russia), pranama guru was Bhakti Vigiana goswami.

Deciding to dedicate my life to serving ISKCON In 2015, I left my job and opened a little prasadam snackbar. In 2017 the snackbar business went bankrupt due to untrustworthy partners of mine who came from ISKCON, however still continued to distribute prasadam alone. 

In 2018 I read the book "The Final Order" and understood the true position of Srila Prabhupada’s order on how initiation should be conducted after the departure of him. Having realised this truth I began to preach this to the devotees of ISKCON but on the contrary I had to stop preaching as I was not entertained by the devotees who soon declared me as a terrible demon.

Having been expelled by ISKCON I stayed with an old brahmacary named Asita prabhu who too accepted in the heart the supreme position of Srila Prabhupada as the real guru for everyone. We then began to study seriously the history of ISKCON came to understand how ISKCON is very deviantly misleading everyone on the guru issue. We became thoroughly convinced to establish the ritvik system of initiation. 

Soon we started a small preaching center since 2020. We are now trying to preach this to the many of ISKCON devotees and also to many new people.
Since end of 2019 we cooperated with the temple of Goryachiy Kluch and listened to Sundar Gopal prabhu and other preachers from International Shri Krsna Mandir (ISKM). 

Having been fervently convinced by the true spirit of ISKM, we celebrated Gaura Purnima under the ISKM banner establishing ourselves as members of ISKM ST Petersburg. We are now printing many of Srila Prabhupada's books and also the Initiation after 1977 book. We have began to distribute widely to many people on the street.

We are hoping and praying that our Center will soon grow very popular and become very soundly established. Thank you for the helping in initiating me as a servant of Srila Prabhupada indeed I have been waiting for this for a good eight years and now my desire of being a true servant of Srila Prabhupada has finally come true.

I am feeling very inspired and very enthused by this eternal connection to Srila Prabhupada and I thank Sundar Gopal Prabhu for this. I very strongly recommend everyone to come forward and take this opportunity to connect with Srila Prabhupada through a very genuine moment like ISKM.

I am humbly praying to all the vaisnavas to pls bless me so that I can carry on serving Srila Prabhupada and all the vaisnavas eternally. Pls forgive me for any offences.

Your lowly servant,
Yugavatara Das

[PADA: Very nice. We need to increase the number of Prabhupadanugas worldwide. We also have some contacts in Russia and they too are catching up to speed on these issues. PADA has a regular readership base that reads our news blog from Russia, according to our regional stats. So people are getting educated on the history at least here and there.

We also have contacts from people who are living inside of ISKCON. And they report they simply have to stay under the radar at present because, as we see above, they will be branded as "terrible demons" should they ever declare they are Prabhupadanugas. 

Meanwhile, this virus pandemic problem seems to be really breaking down the organizational power and institutional economic system of the ISKCON GBC / caste brahmana / ISKCON Pharisee / voted in guru system, which is really helpful to our program. Perhaps this is how Krishna will bust up their power structure more and more. 

Anyway, here is another person who agrees, Srila Prabhupada is their acharya, very good progress. As they say, if you place one brick here and one brick there every day, eventually, you'll have a house. PADA really appreciates the many Prabhupadanuga devotees who are cooperating together to make Srila Prabhupada's much needed new house. We also got a very nice letter from another ex-ISKCON devotee who wants to have more info, so we are making headway regularly in a number of locations simultaneously. ys pd 

angel108b@yahoo.com]