Golden Horses, Red Square

On 30 May 1935, 28 riders left Ashgabat, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan, on what may be the most improbable petition in the history of animal husbandry. They would ride to Moscow, some 4,300 kilometres across desert, plateau, steppe, and forest, in the summer heat. Their horses were Akhal-Tekes: lean, metallic-coated desert animals bred on the oases below the Kopet Dag mountains for 3,000 years. The riders were not cavalrymen but kolkhozniki, collective farm workers, and the state whose favour they had set out to win was the same that had ordered their breed destroyed.

Turkmenistan had come under Soviet control in the 1920s. On 27 October 1924 the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic was formally established and Moscow set about remaking a largely rural, tribal society. The collectivisation of agriculture began in 1926 and hardened into a coercive campaign by the end of the decade, redistributing the lands of wealthy landowners and folding peasants, livestock, and holdings into state-run kolkhozes. By 1929 nearly 15 per cent of Turkmen peasant farmers had been collectivised; by 1940 the figure exceeded 99 per cent, and thousands of daykhans (prosperous farmers) branded as kulaks (opponents of Soviet agricultural policy) had perished.

By the early 1930s the Akhal-Teke, caught in this upheaval, was close to extinction. Collectivisation dismantled the household system in which a single prized stallion was tethered beside the family yurt and treated as kin. The authorities banned private ownership, registered the horses with the state, and ordered breeding stock to be slaughtered for meat, a demand that was taboo among Turkmen. Owners hid their animals or turned them loose in the desert rather than comply. The purebred population was already struggling after the Russian conquest: the first official census of 1916 counted just 627 heads, and when the first studbook – an official pedigree register – was published in 1941 it recorded only 755 purebreds. Worse, in pursuit of a faster racehorse, Soviet studs were crossing the breed with English Thoroughbreds to produce the ‘Anglo-Teke’. Three millennia of selective breeding looked likely to dissolve within a generation.

The ride was conceived as a rebuttal. If the purebred Akhal-Tekes could out-endure the crossbred Anglo-Tekes over the cruellest course imaginable, the case for the Anglo-Teke would collapse. The organisers argued in the regime’s own language: this was no nostalgic gesture but a Stalinist set piece, a record-breaking feat, scientifically documented and heroically staffed. A veterinary team weighed rations, measured pulse and temperature before and after each march, and drew blood at intervals. The horses were shod in three patterns to compare wear, and salt was added to the feed against the losses of sweat. A correspondent for Turkmenskaya Iskra filed dispatches from the trail, and a cameraman shot footage later cut into a documentary, Heroes of Kolkhoz Turkmenistan. The riders were chosen as much for revolutionary credentials as for horsemanship: Gabysh Mamysh, the oldest rider at 55, served as the ride’s party organiser. The standard-bearer, Yanar Anna Oraz, came from an udarnik (shock-worker) collective farm, and two other riders, Nepes Karakhan and Bek Murad Anna Murad, had fought against the anti-Soviet Basmachi movement. The breed would be saved, if at all, as a triumph of socialist labour.

The first leg was the worst. The Karakum, among the hottest sand deserts on Earth, had to be crossed. Ground temperatures reached 60°C and wells sunk during the Russian Civil War were fouled with the carcasses of animals. A commander in the NKVD, the Soviet state’s secret police, Semyon Petrovich Sokolov, who monitored the ride, recorded horses refusing the sulphurous water at Darvaza until the men poured it through their nostrils by hand. Elsewhere the riders tore up wild lucerne (alfalfa) for fodder, hauled water barrels up the cliffs of the Ustyurt plateau, and laid saxaul branches across the dunes so the horses would not sink to their knees. Yet, as a dispatch noted, ‘contrary to general fears, the stony soils of the Ustyurt did no harm to the Akhal-Tekes’. Then came the opposite ordeal: the damp of the Volga steppe and the Russian interior, where animals bred for aridity caught chills and colic in the rain. They averaged around 50 kilometres a day, with bursts past 100 when the ground allowed it. The verdict the organisers had hoped for emerged on the trail: ‘The purebred Akhal-Tekes Arab, Dorkush, Alsakar, Titanik, Al-Kush and others freely covered up to 4,000 kilometres, while the half-bred stallions Dor-Depel and Burnok fell off badly’, wrote Turkmenskaya Iskra.

The column reached Red Square on 22 August, 84 days after departing, and laid flowers at the Kremlin wall. The riders received the Order of the Red Star; the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, handed each a gold watch; the agriculture commissariat, with a bureaucrat’s notion of generosity, gave them bicycles. The next day they were received in the Kremlin, where Voroshilov reported that Stalin himself had followed the ride. The official decree closed: ‘Glory to the fearless dzhigits [horsemen] of scorching Turkmenia!’ Studbook authorities ruled that crossbred horses born after 1936 would no longer count as Akhal-Tekes. The Anglo-Teke experiment was dead and Akhal-Teke prestige was secured.

The bloodline went on to vindicate itself in the arena the regime cared about most. Arab, a grey Akhal-Teke from the ride, was presented to Stalin and became a champion in eventing and jumping; his son, Absent, carried Sergei Filatov to the Soviet Union’s first equestrian gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics, with further medals at Tokyo and Mexico City to follow. The horses the state had nearly sent to the slaughterhouse became, within a generation, the face of Soviet equestrian prestige.

In 1937 master weavers in Ashgabat knotted the ride into a commemorative carpet, Horse Run. The impulse to monumentalise was the regime’s, but the medium was Turkmen, older than the USSR and destined to outlast it. The carpet still hangs in the All-Russian Decorative Art Museum in Moscow. The deeper significance of the ride lies in this doubleness: a breed that embodied everything the Soviet project sought to absorb – the nomadic, the tribal – survived by being recast as a symbol of proletarian heroism. Independent Turkmenistan has since made the breed its national emblem, honoured with an annual holiday. The household knowledge that shaped the breed, once handed from father to son, is now taught in a state academy. Recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2023, roughly 6,600 Akhal-Tekes survive worldwide, still bred below 
the Kopet Dag.

Christopher Wizda is a historian of Turkmenistan and the Caspian region, and a Listed Researcher at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.