Peterburgian Vedism "to know" ("vedat")—a semantic root which is shared in Slavic and Sanskrit languages alike—, and it expresses the difference between sight or knowledge and dogmatic belief ("verit"), the latter being typical of non-Vedic doctrines. According to one of the contemporary leaders of the Peterburgian Vedic movement, Roman Perin, "Rodnovery" defines the practised religion, while "Vedism" defines the philosophy or knowledge at its core. Vedism therefore is not a religion but pure knowledge. According to Bezverkhy, dogmatic religions such as Christianity, but also Brahmanism (the successor of Vedism in India), were created in order to control the masses. Bezverkhy codified his
Peterburgian Vedism ideas in a series of eleven books, namely "Rigveda", "History of Religion", "History of Philosophy", "Philosophy", "Physics", "Astrology", "Anthropology", "Sociology", "Ethics", "Aesthetics" and "Philosophy of Religion". According to its theorists, Vedism is the fundamental philosophical core common to all Indo-Europeans (i.e. Aryans). The Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery) is one of its expressions, among others, so that in their view Vedism increasingly resembles an overarching category encompassing many local religions, just like Orthodox Christianity encompasses a number of autocephalous churches. Viktor Bezverkhy graduated in philosophy at the N. G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy of Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) and later taught at