A reasonable question even a few years ago might have been: instructor to whom? In the days of the Soviet Union, exercise was a pastime almost exclusively of state workers, who showed up at government gyms two or three times a week only because their pay was docked if they did not. Now, finally, the fitness craze that caught on in the West some two decades ago has come to Russia. Its adherents are Russian Yuppies with income to dispose of. For them, health and fitness are fashionable.
Morning television now features 30-minute bun-burning shows and infomercials for stationary bikes. In the past three years, more than 2,000 aerobics teachers have been certified in the former Soviet Union. Sales of vitamins and diet pills are soaring. Petrochenko says some of her 500 clients “come to work out five days a week.” It is, she says, “like an epidemic.”
Predictably, U.S. companies have moved to capitalize on the phenomenon. Gold’s Gym, whose Venice, Calif., flagship is the Mecca of Muscledom, recently opened a flashy–and expensive–health club in Moscow. Nike and Reebok, which envision Russia as a gigantic market for sneakers and garb, sponsor gyms and fitness seminars.
Skeptics see the new, foreign-sponsored health clubs in Moscow as a place for the idle (and criminally) rich to pass their time. Larisa Sidneva, the president of the three-year-old Russian Federation of Aerobics, couldn’t disagree more. She says health consciousness among Russians is a sign of how private enterprise is now flourishing in Russia. How’s that, exactly? In the old days, she explains, when the state owned and ran everything, workers could get drunk every night and not show up for work. It hardly mattered. Now, she says, people working for private companies “think if they don’t show up for work they’ll lose their job.” Better to stay healthy, work out a bit and keep those sick days to a minimum. In a period of pervasive pessimism in Russia, it’s a quirkily optimistic thought.
