Russia was in 2011 ranked 20th worldwide by the World Rugby,[2] having over three hundred clubs and close to 22,000 players nationally.

[6] Since the early medieval times Russians played a ballgame, in many ways similar to rugby.

In Russian it has been called "Kila" (kee-LAH,) the earliest written accounts of which go back to the 12th Century Novgorod Republic.

As the game was strongly associated with pre-Christian pagan traditions, the Russian Orthodox Church didn't tolerate it.

By the 19th Century the sport declined and died-out, especially after the English-type soccer was adopted and spread throughout the late Russian Empire.

[citation needed] The game was more or less banned for a number of years in the Soviet Union because of an incident in a final in Moscow, when supporters of Llanelli and a Bucharest team were involved in a brawl.

The two main areas for Russian rugby were to be Moscow and Siberia, and to a lesser extent, Leningrad/St Petersburg.

[9] Nonetheless, the extreme climate of Russia remains a problem, with winter sometimes being a split season, or the game of snow rugby being played.

Rugby's rise into mainstream media happened a few years ago when the Heineken Cup, a club tournament in Europe, was given television coverage on the 7TV sports channel.

In 2007 Moscow made an unsuccessful bid to host the 2009 Rugby World Cup Sevens.

Their second-place finish in 2008–10 also secured Russia's first appearance in the Rugby World Cup, which took place in 2011 in New Zealand.

[citation needed] The Super Cup was an annual international rugby union competition contested by national teams from Canada, Japan, Romania and the United States.

[citation needed] Russia previously played as part of the USSR, and in the early 1990s, as a combined CIS team.