From Wikipedia: "Afanasy Nikitin (Russian: Афана́сий Ники́тин; died 1472) was a Russian[1] merchant of Tver and one of the first Europeans (after Niccolò de' Conti) to travel to and document his visit to India. He described his trip in a narrative known as The Journey Beyond Three Seas(Khozheniye za tri morya)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasy_Nikitin See also the same article on https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Afanasy_Nikitin
Indian Diplomacy
Published on Aug 31, 2012Afanasy Nikitin, a 15th century trader, made a historic and fascinating journey from Tver near Moscow to India by way of the Caspian region and Iran, and stayed in India for 3 years before going back to Russia. He visited India even before Vasco Da Gama came and wrote an account of his travels in his 'Voyage over the Three Seas'. 'Footsteps of Nikitin' is the journey of a team comprising of an eclectic mix of historians, economists and trade analysts, explorers, journalists, photographers and the film crew, who travelled through the routes Nikitin followed from Tver to India (North Karnataka). Traversing Nikitin's route, the expedition tries to find out what attracted Nikitin to India and how his journey influenced other countries in the region.
Read "From Tver to Calicut: Retracing Afanasy Nikitin’s life in India" https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2016/08/06/from-tver-to-calicut-retracing-afanasy-nikitins-life-in-india_618137
"The Russian merchant arrived in India in 1469 and lived in the country for three years, travelling all the way to Kerala and Sri Lanka. His time in India coincided with the decline of the Bahmani Sultanate. Nikitin’s impressions of India were well documented in his narrative titled ‘Voyage Beyond Three Seas’..."
Read "The travels of Athanasius Nikitin ... / translated from the Russian, with notes, by Count Wielhorsky" section of India in the fifteenth century : being a collection of narratives of voyages to India, in the century preceeding the Portugese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope ; from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian sources, now first translated into English, 1857. at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/indiainfifteenth00majorich/page/n7
Read online or download a file. Nikitin's chapter begins on p. 198 https://archive.org/details/indiainfifteenth00majorich/page/n197
An easier to read pdf file of the work is at http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/nikitin_wielhorsky.pdf
Read
"Deconstructing Colonial Historiography: A Case Study of Afanasy Nikitin" by Awadhesh Kumar Jha at https://bargad.org/2015/03/10/deconstructing-colonial-historiography-a-case-study-of-afanasy-nikitin/
"...To construct the history of India- Russia relation during the fifteenth Century, Nikitin’s travelogue is an important source. The account is not lengthy, but short. However it covers almost all aspects of India’s pre-modern history, particularly of 15th Century, so much so that many new things can be added to the whole narrative of 15th Century India. Nikitin visited India with a commercial motive, but according to Minayev, this did not prove an impediment to his recording of those facets of Indian life which had no direct link with his profit consideration. Thus he recorded all those facets of socio- religious and politico-cultural aspects of 15th Century India with which he encountered with. For Minayev he was a genius who had recorded things which finds less mention in other contemporary sources, like things such as, what and how Indians ate? How they prayed to their gods? What they did with the relatives who die? How they dressed? How different was the standard of living between the rulers and the ruled? Etc...."