In 1970, the Kiev studio for scientific films, a state-owned propaganda institute, had released a documentary film titled ‘Indian yogis – who are they?’ It introduced yoga as ‘Ancient Indian health-care-practice” and showed ‘Indian yogis performing extraordinary physical actions, which contradicted all laws of human physiology’. The principal consultant and co-producer of the film was Brodov.



It rekindled strong interest in yoga throughout the Soviet Union. Suddenly Soviet officials woke to the fact that yoga was a philosophy that might be contradicting Marxist-Leninism. As the official Soviet line showed changes, the Soviet press started portraying yoga negatively, even warning people that it would cause epilepsy, mental illness, and physical damage. Yoga was banned in the public sphere and Brodov was forced into further distorting yoga. He even made the proper ideological adjustments to the yoga system and got an entry for it in the official Soviet ‘Scientific and Atheist dictionary’. Finally in 1973, the Sports Committee of the Soviet Council of Ministers officially condemned yoga, declaring it ‘incompatible with Marxist-Leninist ideology and called “a Trojan horse of Indian idealism.”



Soon Brodov found himself in a leading position among a group of eminent scholars containing scientists and public figures, who took the great risk of ‘writing an open letter to General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Aleksey Kosygin with a request to legalise yoga and establish a yoga therapy scientific research institute.’