Yoga has become increasingly popular in Russia since the 1980s, particularly in major cities, mainly due to its reputation for health benefits. B. K. S. Iyengar twice visited the country, leading to the establishment of some fifty Iyengar Yoga studios, the best-known of them in the Old Arbat district of Moscow. In 1991, the managing editor of Yoga Journal , Linda Cogozzo, noted that Mikhail Gorbachev 's glasnost had allowed yoga to be practised openly. She recorded that in 1986 Arkadiy Greenblatt had been put in prison for three years for teaching yoga, but in 1990 an American delegation, including noted practitioners Judith Lasater , Amrit Desai and Lilias Folan , had been allowed to visit Russia and share knowledge of yoga. It also mentioned two men, Yuri Nicolaiovich Polkovnikov and Genadiy Gregorievich Stasenko, who took the risk of teaching yoga in Russian gymnasiums in the 1960s, describing it as "gymnastics or health therapy". Russia's first school of yoga was founded in Moscow in 1993 by Viktor Sergeyevich Boyko ; it has expanded to have branches around Russia.
Yoga steadily increased in popularity; in 2007, the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev , stated that "little by little, I'm mastering yoga".By 2015, yoga was ubiquitous, with a class in every gym and new yoga studios in every town. The president, Vladimir Putin , met the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit that year, and promised to try yoga alongside his other sporting activities.In 2018, two entrepreneurs who made their money in knitting, Mikhail Galaev and Dmitry Demin, founded Prana, a yoga business in Moscow with 23 practice rooms, said to be the largest in Europe. Yoga styles available in Russia have expanded to include new forms such as Aerial Yoga (with hammocks) and Jivamukti Yoga . [29] The Russian yoga teacher Nina Mel,who created "N-Code Yoga Practice", was featured asYoga Magazine's teacher of the month in 2019.
Russia's relationship with yoga has remained uneasy, however; in 2015, officials in Nizhnevartovsk closed yoga classes as "religious cults"in 2017, the yoga teacher Dmitry Ugay was charged with "illegal missionary activity" under an anti-terrorism law;and in 2019 the Russian member of parliament Yelena Mizulina stated that yoga could "turn people gay.
Stanislavski's system :
The Russian actor and trainer Constantin Stanislavski developed a system for training actors significantly influenced by yoga and Indian philosophy. He saw how beneficial yoga was for his students and used it extensively in the Second Studio (founded 1916), in the Opera Studio (1918–1922), and in the Moscow Arts Theatre , where his 1919–1920 notebooks describe the use of Hatha Yoga alongside Swedish gymnastics, rhythm exercises, and voice training. In the Opera Studio he spoke of "the laws of correct breathing, the correct position of the body, concentration and watchful discrimination"; the scholar William H. Wegner glosses these as pranayama , asana , and dharana respectively.Stanislavski was thus, note the scholars Dorinda Hulton and Maria Kapsali, making use of traditional yoga, not its modern posture-based form , which had not yet been created.
Indra Devi :
The yoga pioneer Indra Devi ( Russian 1899 – 2002) was born in the Russian Empire . She escaped to the West during the Russian Revolution and studied yoga under Tirumalai Krishnamacharya . She helped to make yoga popular as exercise in America , especially amongst women, and in 1960 visited the USSR , seeing St Petersburg (then Leningrad ) for the first time in 40 years, and meeting the government ministers Andrei Gromyko and Alexei Kosygin at the Indian ambassador's reception at the Sovetskaya Hotel.
