Mishka is a Slavic diminutive, often of Mikhail, meaning 'who is like God?' and also used affectionately as 'little bear.'
Mishka is a Russian diminutive of Mikhail — the Russian form of Michael — derived from the Hebrew מִיכָאֵל (Mikha'el), meaning "Who is like God?" a rhetorical question asserting divine incomparability. Michael was the name of the archangel who leads God's armies in the Book of Revelation and who appears across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scripture as a protector and intercessor.
But in everyday Russian, mishka (мишка) has a second, entirely independent life: it is the affectionate word for "little bear," a child's word for the animal, as warm and familiar as the English "teddy bear." A child named Mishka thus walks through the world with two meanings trailing behind them — archangel and stuffed animal — a pairing that is somehow exactly right. The name is beloved in Russia and across Slavic cultures as both a standalone name and a pet name for any Mikhail.
It gained international visibility in part through Cheburashka, the beloved Soviet animated character who is friends with a crocodile named Gena, and through the 1980 Moscow Olympics, whose mascot was Misha the bear — an image so warmly received that it remains one of the most iconic Olympic mascots in history. In literature, bears named Mishka appear throughout Russian children's folklore, cementing the name's association with gentle strength. Beyond Russia, Mishka has been adopted by Jewish communities as a Yiddish-inflected diminutive, by South Asian families drawn to its sound, and by Western parents who encountered it through Russian culture or simply loved the way it feels in the mouth. Its softness, its bear-hug warmth, and its dual resonance of the sacred and the cuddly make it genuinely cross-cultural — a name that lands differently depending on where you are standing when you hear it.