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by Sergey PakhomovThere is a huge empirical material on the topic of yoga's history in the USSR, i. e. memories of contemporaries, photographic and film documents, various articles and books. However, it has not yet become a subject of serious scientific analysis, despite its relevance: Yoga is extremely popular in various countries of the former Soviet Union, and many of the actual teachers, experts in yoga, and many schools, appeared in the Soviet era (mainly towards the end of it) or were connected with this era by genetic ties.I restrict myself to outline the most important “yogic events”, as well as to show the conceptual framework of understanding yoga in the Soviet Union. Beyond my review will be Buddhist yoga in the USSR, as well as different forms of confessional yoga such as Vaishnava bhakti-yoga. I will consider mainly the mainstream of Soviet yoga. It should be considered that the sources about the history of yoga in the Soviet period are quite uneven. Thus, the period of the 1920s–1940s has been very poorly documented, while there is rich material about yoga in the 1980s. Information about yoga came into the USSR primarily from the West (very seldom from India itself). Yoga in the USSR was outside of its historical homeland, outside of a distinctive religious and philosophical foundations, almost no one who had practiced Yoga knew Indian languages; Yoga usually functioned as a part of a broader set of, say, cold hardening practices, physical training, gymnastics and so on. Very few people could do yoga professionally.Although this post focuses only on yoga in the Soviet period, it seems obvious that yoga existed in Russia earlier, and in many ways the image, which was accepted in the pre-Soviet era, determined also the attitude and perception of it in later times. In the history of Soviet yoga six different periods of unequal length can be distinguished. 1922–1930 Pre-revolutionary yoga, which was very fashionable, was gradually disappeared.1930–1953 Yoga was &#160;almost absent in the country. Only rare, single cases of yogic practice have been documented. In this period the samizdat, i. e. self-publishing appears, including a yogic one. 1953–1960 Cases of documented yoga-practices were still rare and singled out. Yoga was publicly criticized, but there was no physical persecution anymore. The first large-scale attempt to popularize yoga (by Ivan Evteev-Volski) dates back to this period. More yogic samizdat writings have appeared. The 1960s The interest in yoga increased in Soviet society. The first official article on the subject appeared in the press. For the first time, an Indian guru (Dhirendra Brahmachari) visited the USSR. The first schools of “Neoyoga” appeared. And the first certified yoga instructor (Zubkov) began to popularize yoga. 1970–1988 The popularization of yoga; professional yogis appeared, esp. after the documentary Indian yogis: Who are they? (1970) was screened. Health groups, sports clubs and public round table discussions were organized, together with numerous articles and books in print. There were attempts to mildly persecute yoga: In 1973, it was prohibited.1988–1991 The golden age of Soviet yoga. Political problems with yoga had been suspended. Then it was an explosion of yoga. Large international conferences were held: Foreign specialists arrived, including B. K. S. Iyengar. In 1989, the Association of Yoga in the USSR was founded. The development of yoga in the USSR went largely parallel to its history in the West, from where it came to the Soviet Union. The same authors who were popular in the Western world were in demand also in pre-revolutionary Russia. First of all there were Swami Vivekananda and Yogi Ramacharaka (William Atkinson), whose books were translated into Russian before 1917 and gained a large audience in Russia (see, for example, Vivekananda 1911; Ramacharaka 1914; 1916).  The position of yoga in the USSR from early on was the same as any other worldview and practice, which did not fit into the official ideology. This was a matter for every religious dogma or movement, including Western esotericism.&#160;During the first years after the revolution, some isolated groups of adherents of Esotericism and Eastern spirituality were still active. Books by Ramacharaka, Vivekananda, Sedir, etc., and Theosophical literature, published shortly before the October revolution, did not disappear at once. For example, yoga was incorporated in the educational system of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the great Russian theatre director, who had read books by Ramacharaka attentively and used them in his training program for actors (Cherkassky 2009). After the gradual decline of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the late 1920s the ideological situation in the country deteriorated, and these changes affected yoga.&#160; Stanislavsky himself did not use the term “yoga” in his writings any more since this period, because he had to fear repression as well (Cherkassky 2009, 282–283). Yoga gradually disappeared, and seemed to have gone into oblivion, texts related to yoga were not published any more. Although practicing yoga was not officially forbidden, the general situation in the country was unfavorable to it. The (geo-)political situation in the 1930s and the 1940s only supported this trend. In a country where political control and repression were omnipresent, open yoga classes were impossible. Single enthusiasts like Ivan Yevteyev-Volsky were exceptions to this sad situation. Different from the pre-revolutionary encyclopedias, i. e. the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary and the Granat Encyclopedic Dictionary (Bulich 1894; P. R. 1914), the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in the 1930s, contains no article on yoga. After Stalin’s death in 1953, yoga slowly reappeared, although there were no organized groups, but only solitary adherents engaged in yoga in order to improve their health. For them Yogi Ramacharaka remained the main authority. However, information about yoga was gradually increasing thanks to the emergence of translated histories of Indian philosophy, such as S. Radhakrishnan (1956–1957), S. Chatterjee &#38; D. Datta (1955), M. Roy (1958). The first Soviet edition of the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Boris L. Smirnov, was published in 1956 (Bhagavadgita 1956). In the preface to this translation, Smirnov writes a lot about yoga, correlating its practices with modern medicine and focusing mainly on the description of asanas in the interpretation of the contemporary Indian yogi Swami Kuvalayananda (Arkhipov 2012, 272). At the end of the 1950s the magazine Knowledge is Power (Знание – сила) published an article on yoga by Ivan Yevteyev-Volsky (Yevteev-Volsky 1958). His author was a unique person who at 60 years of age (in 1941), began practicing yoga and significantly improved his health. He first presented a set of yogic exercises. For him, the idol also was Ramacharaka. In 1960, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s famous disciple Indra Devi came to Moscow, where she met with several high-ranking Soviet officials (Anastas Mikoyan, Alexei Kosygin, Anatoly Gromyko) at a reception in the Kremlin. Her visit was organized by the Indian ambassador, but it remained unnoticed by the press and the general public. Nothing followed from this visit (Klevalina 2010).The authorities regarded yoga with suspicion. While its philosophical and religious foundations were completely swept aside, the yogic contribution to human enhancement was partly accepted and seen as compatible with modern scientific data.Anatoliy Zubkov, 1990 ©A. N. Zubkov's personal archive The 1960s were characterized by the first appearance of yoga professionals, who actively popularized yoga. The one who had most unique experience was Anatoly Zubkov, who during his four-year official journey to Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) in 1963–1967 had studied yoga under the guidance of a guru from the Swami Sivananda’s tradition (Kukalev &#38; Zubkova web.). He even received a certificate giving him the right to heal with yoga and to teach yoga. Almost until the end of the USSR, he was the only certified yoga instructor, who had studied with an Indian (ibid.). Indian gurus were absent in the USSR. This period is also interesting by the appearance of “new”, i. e. a modernized Hatha Yoga from schools by Krishnamacharya, Brahmachari, Shivananda. This new yoga was superimposed on the yoga practiced before (Ramacharaka-yoga) and gradually came to replace it.The consolidation of Soviet-Indian relations in various fields of politics and economy in the 1950s started a new wave of interest in yoga. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, paid an official visit to India. In the following year the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi visited the USSR. Yury Gagarin and Leonid Brezhnev, too, went to India in 1961; and in 1964, Indian President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan visited the Soviet Union. Interest in Indian culture, fostered by the government, was met by a vital interest in Russian literature in India. In this period, the attitude of Soviet authorities to yoga was still restrained, but not hostile. Yoga was considered to be incompatible with the spirit of building communism. The science fiction writer Ivan Efremov expressed criticism with this position in his novel The Razor’s Edge (Лезвие бритвы) (Efremov 1964). &#160;It expressed the hope that Soviet scientific materialism would be compatible with the positive achievements of Indian yogis and introduced a lot of information about an amazingly wide spectrum of different yoga schools and traditions. However, in the 2nd edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which was published in the 1960s, articles on yoga were still not allowed to be published.A scene from the documentary Indian yogis: Who are they?  © Kievnauchfilm, 1970 A second significant influence on the development of yoga came from the  writings of Vassily Brodov (1912–1997), a Soviet orientalist and expert  of Indian philosophy. Since the 1960s he had been secretly practicing  yoga in order to restore his failing health. His article “The doctrine  of the Indian yogis of human health in the light of modern science”  (1962) (Brodov &#38; Sukharebsky 1962) represented the first official  attitude, although even this was in disguise. Yoga was mainly treated in  a critical way against the background of a significant superiority of  Soviet scientific communism to the mystical idealism of yogis. Brodov is  also explicitly critical about Yevteyev-Volsky’s earlier articles,  calling them nonsense. Slava Kurilov © Elena Gendeleva-Kurilova Although Soviet authorities demonstrated their ideological rejection of  yoga, their politics were contradictory. There were, at the same time,  attempts to use yogis’ developments for economic needs and health  training for technological advantages in the space industry. For this  secret task, the famous guru Dhirendra Brahmachari arrived in Moscow in  the early 1960s and held several lessons for Soviet cosmonauts. He also  organized a yoga club, in which Brodov was included. Others clubs would  follow. In the late 1960s, there was a new wave of interest in yoga. In  the Rural youth (Сельская молодежь) magazine yoga popularizer  Anatoly Zubkov published a series of articles, which caused a boom of  enthusiastic readers’ letters from all over the country (Kukalev &#38;  Zubkova web.). Zubkov took advantage in this interest and wrote the  screenplay for the documentary “Indian yogis: Who are they?”, which was  directed by Almar Serebrenikov and shot in Kiev in 1970 (Kievnauchfilm, Индийские йоги – кто они?).  It was the first film on yoga in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact  that the philosophy of yoga was condemned for its mystical implications  (Arkhipov 2012, 272), the release of the film on &#160;TV-screen caused a  great wave of interest among spectators; and in 1972, a round-table  discussion was organized by the popular Literary newspaper (Литературная газета) (Boyko web), in which authoritative medical experts expressed various opinions for and against yoga. Alexey Katkov (1949–1987) The authorities seemed to take the great popularity of yoga as a failure   of their strategy to debunk “yogic mysticism” in that documentary.  They  went to take extreme measures. In January 24, 1973, the Committee  for  Physical Culture and Sports under the USSR Council of Ministers  issued a  decree prohibiting the promotion and dissemination of yoga and  karate,  bodybuilding, women’s football, and for some reason, the card  game of  bridge. The title of this document is “Certain facts of  improper  development of certain types of physical exercise and sport”  (Makarov  2011, 46). The reason was given that these exercises are not   contributing to the harmonious development of man and do not conform to   the ideological orientation of the Soviet system of physical education.   Yoga was called a “Trojan horse of Indian idealism”. However, by then   this prohibition couldn’t stop the engagement of the Soviet people in   yoga anymore. They continued to do what they liked in the   semi-underground. “Competent authorities” periodically dispersed these   groups, seized their samizdat literature, conducted educational talks,   but, by and large, the persecution was soft enough and no yogi was   arrested for practicing yoga. But nevertheless there were lawsuits   against them. In particular, “for disseminating fabrications defaming   the Soviet system” (article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code), the   famous Leningrad yogi Anatoly Ivanov suffered in 1977. He spent three   years in prison-camp (ibid., 47–49). But even then, he was not judged   explicitly for yoga. Almost a decade later in the Perestroika period,   shortly before the annulation of the prohibition, the head of a large   yogic school, Arkady Greenblatt, was arrested in Moscow in 1986.   However, he was accused not of practicing yoga, but of making a profit   out of his classes. Three years later he was released, but in the West   he was still seen as a victim of the state regime. Another a unique case of a confrontation of a yogi with the state system was the oceanologist Stanislav Kurilov (1936–1998), who ran off from the cruise ship “Soviet Union” in December 1974, eager to break through to the West. He swam about 100 km to Siargao Island (Philippines) for three days, without food and water. He owed his success to yoga, which he practiced intensively at that time (Kurilov 2019). Suspicion the authorities expressed towards yoga can also be explained by the fact that yoga classes were often taught by incompetent people based on bad translations, and some Soviet people have been badly injured as a result.By the 1970–1980s, there was a lot of information available on yoga.  There was, for example, the article “Yoga” (1973) in the third edition  of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, written by Alexander  Pyatigorsky and David Zilberman (Pyatigorsky &#38; Zilberman 1972). It  was devoid of the Marxist attributes and quite intelligible at the time.  Other articles appeared in popular science magazines, and in 1982  Victor Vereshchagin’s book The Physical Culture of Indian Yogis  (Vereshchagin 1982) was published in Minsk, celebrated as another  significant break-through. This was the first book publication on yoga  in the Soviet Union. The author treats yoga devoid of any religious and  philosophical dimensions, but exclusively as a recreational practice,  aiming to “open the hidden physical and mental reserves of the human  body, the mastery of which is not available through other means of  training” (ibid., 9).B. K. S. Iyengar's presentation in Moscow, 1989 In the 1970s scattered yoga groups spread especially in Moscow, but also  across the country, were organized as health or sport clubs, such as  Yan Koltunov’s club “Cosmos” in Moscow. Some of the most influential  teachers of yoga of that time were Igor Poltavtsev, Grigory Statsenko,  Yan Koltunov, Anatoly Zubkov, and Victor Boyko. Scholarly research on  yoga also continued, often conducted within the secret Soviet  laboratories. The physiologist Alexey Katkov studied yoga in extreme  conditions. Unfortunately, he died during the performance of an  experiment and froze on Elbrus in 1987 (Menzel 2011, 167). By the end of  the 1980s, yoga’s popularity in the USSR greatly accelerated. The  public mood was in favor of the yoga community. A new chapter in the  history of yoga began when, in 1988, the “Physical culture and sport”  magazine arranged a round-table discussion about the uses of yoga,  including Brodov, Zubkov and other scientists (Boyko web). The vast  majority of opinions about yoga was positive. At the end of the same  year the Center of Nonconventional Methods of Recovery at the Central  Research Institute of Biomedical Problems of the USSR State Committee  was founded, presided by Yury Belous, with a yoga section led by Lev  Teternikov. The first legal seminar on yoga was held in May 1989 in  Dagomys (Black Sea region) on “Yoga and Health” with more than 100  participants (ibid.).  Another pivotal event of 1989 was the First All-Union Scientific and Practical Conference “Yoga: The problem of healing and self-development of man” (ibid.) in Moscow (October 19–21, 1989). Among the 700 participants there were also many foreigners. For the first time, Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar came to the Soviet Union, and he was received as a star. Among other notorious guests were Angela and Victor Farmer. During this conference, the Association of Yoga in the USSR was founded, headed by Brodov. Although this Association quietly ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, another conference (the second and the last) was held in December 1990. During the flourishing period of Soviet yoga right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, many editions of manuals, numerous books, articles and magazines on yoga were published. Foreign, in particular American, experts on yoga visited Russia even more frequently, yoga lessons were broadcast (i. e., Faeq Biria) and yoga finally became a widespread pursuit. Interest in yoga continued to increase after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it remained in fashion both in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries. References (all in Russian, except the article by B. Menzel)Arkhipov, V. V.  “Yoga v Rossii” [Yoga in Russia].  In Vestnik RGGU (journal): Philosophy, Sociology, Art Studies Series (2012): 272–277.Bhagavadgita (Mahabharata. Iss. 2), tr. from Sanskr. by B. L. Smirnov. Ashkhabad: ANTSSR, 1956.Boyko, V.  “Stranitsy istorii. Razvitie yogi v SSSR” [The Pages of History. The Development of Yoga in the USSR]. Accessed February 21, 2020.  http://www.yogavstrecha.ru/st/boyko2.htm.Brodov, V. V., Sukharebsky, L. M.  “Uchenie indiiskikh yogov o zdorov’e cheloveka v svete sovremennoi nauki” [The Doctrine of the Indian Yogis of Human Health in the Light of Modern Science]. Filosofskie voprosy meditsiny [Philosophical subjects of medicine]. Moskva: Medgiz, 1962. Accessed February 20, 2020. http://www.yogavstrecha.ru/st/brodov.htm.Bulich, S. “Yoga”. In Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona [The Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron] vol. XIIIa. St. Petersburg (1894): 724.Chatterjee, S., Datta, D. Vvedenie v indiiskuyu filosofiyu [An Introduction to Indian Philosophy], tr. from Engl. Moskva: Inostrannaya literatura, 1955.Cherkassky, S. Stanislavsky i yoga: opyt parallel’nogo chteniya [Stanislavsky and Yoga: An Experience of Parallel Reading]. In Voprosy teatra [Theater subjects] (2009): 282–300.Efremov, I. Lezvie britvy [The Razor’s Edge]. Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 1964.Indiiskie yogi – kto oni? [Indian Yogis: Who are They?], produced by A. Serebrennikov. 50 min. Accessed February 21, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L4Gcu5U62A.Klevalina, N. “Postavivshaya mir na golovu” [The Woman who turned the World upside down]. In Vokrug sveta [Around the World] no. 10 (October, 2010): 208-221.Kukalev, S.V., Zubkova R. V. Anatoly Nikolaevich Zubkov – istoriya uspekha [Anatoly Zubkov: A History of Success]. Accessed February 20, 2020. http://yogaway.spb.ru/bio.html.Kurilov, S. Odin v okeane [The One in the Ocean] 5 ed. Moskva: Vremya, 2019.Makarov, A. “Presledovaniya prepodavatelei yogi v Sovetskom Soyuze” [The Persecutions on Yoga Teachers in the USSR]. In Acta Samizdatica. Al’manakh. Moskva: GPIB Rossii, etc., (2012): 46–53.Menzel, B. “Occult and Esoteric Movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s”. In The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, ed. by B. Menzel, M. Hagemeister, B. G. Rosenthal,  151–185. München, Berlin: Otto Sagner, 2011.P. R.  “Ioga”. In Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Granat [Granat Encyclopedia] vol. XXII, 648. Moskva: Bratya Granat, 1914.Pyatigorsky, A. M. and Zilberman A. D. “Yoga”. In Bol’shaya soverskaya entsiklopediya [The Great Soviet Encyclopedia], vol. 11. Moskva: Sovetskaya entsiklopedia, 1972.Radhakrishnan, S. Indiiskaya filosofiya [Indian Philosophy], tr. from Engl. Moskva: Inostrannaya literatura, 1956–1957.Ramacharaka. Zhnani yoga [Gnani Yoga], tr. from Engl. St. Petersburg: M. G. Kornfeld, 1914. Ramacharaka. Nauka o dykhanii indiiskikh yogov [Science of Breath of Hindu Yogis], tr. from Engl., 3rd ed. Petrograd: Novyi chelovek, 1916.Roy, M. Istoriya indiiskoi filosofii [The History of Indian Philosophy], tr. from Engl. Moskva: Inostrannaya literature, 1958.Vereshchagin, V. G. Fizicheskaya kul’tura indiiskikh yogov [The Physical Culture of Indian Yogis]. Minsk: Polymya, 1982.Vivekananda. Filosofiya yogi [Yoga's Philosophy], tr. from Engl. Sosnitsa, 1911. Yevteev-Volsky I. “Ya zanimayus’ po sisteme yogov” [I practice the Yoga System]. Znanie-sila [Knowledge is Power] 5 (1958): 15–16. Cite this article as: Sergey Pakhomov, "A Short History of Yoga in the USSR", in&#160;New Age in Russia, 29/02/2020, https://newageru.hypotheses.org/3407The editors do not assume responsibility for the content of this blogpost, including the author-provided photographs.