Horse-Racing in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

IN 1946, Stalin presented the departing American ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, with two thoroughbreds he had admired from a newsreel of the Soviet victory parade on Red Square. The horses sailed to New York under the care of a Russian vet, a jockey and two grooms. 1 Though Harriman was a renowned breeder and racer, Stalin's gift belonged in a tradition of European diplomatic gestures reaching back beyond the Renaissance. And diplomacy formed only part of a broader equestrian culture encompassing the entire spectrum of symbolic and material relationships between man and horse. 2 Economic historians who set out to explore the grittier side of these relationships in the 1970s were conscious of seeming mildly eccentric. 3 Reviewers did little to disabuse them. At that stage, sceptics accustomed to hard-nosed talk of take-off and growth predicted that any renewed interest in equine matters was more likely to stimulate an enhanced awareness of the horse's role among specialists in military, agricultural or transport history than to generate a self-standing literature.