A group of Russian deputies called on Muscovites on Monday to rise up in protest at the planned construction of a Krishna temple at a historic city site they described as a "place of Russian sorrow".
"We are shocked that a plot of land has been assigned in the centre of our fatherland to build a centre of Vedic culture," the 41-strong group, defining itself as "In Support of Traditional Spiritual and Moral Values in Russia," said in a statement published by the Interfax news agency.
The temple, according to Sanjeev Jha, president of the Indian Association in Russia, will be the largest such temple built outside India in the past 800 years and will incorporate a planetarium, several museums, a library of Indian literature and an Indian cafe.
The Moscow authorities have recently decided to allot land to the project, Interfax quoted him as telling a press conference.
But the State Duma (lower house of parliament) cross-party group denounced the scale of the project as "inappropriate to the number of (Krishna) followers" in Moscow and warned "the centre's planned missionary activities will represent neo-religious expansion in the Russian capital".
In particular, they noted that the temple "apparently for 8,000 people" will be built at Khodynskoe Field, "a place of Russian sorrow."
The coronation of tsar Nicholas II at Khodynskoe in 1896 was marked by catastrophe when some 2,000 of the estimated 700,000 Russians who flocked there to attend the ceremony were crushed to death.
"Many priests took the tragedy ... as a warning and an appeal to Russian Orthodox believers to repent. Members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness do not belong to any of the traditional religions of Russia, and furthermore they have been defined as a destructive sect," the deputies said.
The group urged Muscovites "to speak up and prevent the construction of the Krishna temple by every legal means."
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness opened its first Hindu temple in Russia in 1990.
It is visited by many of Moscow's estimated 15,000 Indian population and about 10,000 Russian followers, but is regarded by the faithful as being in bad shape.
An Indian parliamentary delegation headed by speaker Manohar Joshi visited the temple last September.