History
Rugby league was played in the Soviet Union prior to World War 2, but died out. A Russian delegation attended Dewsbury's 1973 English Championship win and suggested that exhibition games be held in Eastern Europe to gauge interest.
Rugby league returned in the late 1980s thanks largely to the efforts of Edgar Taturyan (there are different spellings of his name due to problems converting Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet). Edgar Taturyan helped develop the new game with players from Moscow's rugby schools and supervised the game's expansion outside of the capital.
Early success for Russian rugby league came in the form of one of the Locomotive Rugby Football Club's junior team of 1987 which was sent to England to compete in a series of matches. Despite being expected to lose every game to their far more experienced opponents, the youngsters won all five of their matches. This proved that Russia could take to rugby league as well as any other country.
Taturyan's work allowed rugby league to become established; more importantly it was established before the onset of the chaos that accompanied the dissolution of the USSR, which would have made it nearly impossible to establish a new sport in Russia after 1991. Luckily by that time the Russian Rugby Football League (RRFL) had already been established.
Mr Maslov, at the time a member of the Russian Rugby Union (RRU), watched a game of rugby league on BBC TV and was instantly converted. With that, Maslov and his friend and President of the Russian Rugby Union, Edgar Taturyan, formed the RRFL.
Read more about this topic: Rugby League In Russia
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