The Trotting Horses Of Count Orlov

Russia's most famous horse farm is the place where one count's love for his empress led to the making of equine history, as Katy Daigle reports.KHRENOVOYE, Southern Russia -- Zhenya Kazmin comes to work with the dawn every morning, as he has for more than 20 years. As he throws open the creaky wooden doors of the horse barn, he is greeted with a chorus of equine ululation. The horses at the famous Khrenovskoi breeding farm know it is time for breakfast.


Wearing dark blue cotton work clothes and dust in his hair, Kazmin is one of eight trainers responsible for turning the famed Orlov trotters into champions, or at least marketable beasts. If they don't develop, he said, they don't sell. There are about 650 purebred Arabians, Russian heavy draft horses and Orlov trotters to attend to. But the only animals interesting to Kazmin are the trotters.


"You ride behind the horse's haunches in a carriage. You grip the reins," he said, absentmindedly jiggling last night's raindrops from a nearby tree branch. "And when you're driving and everything is going well, and they are responding a certain way, it's like you are holding the horse's mind in your hands."


Intended for hauling imperial carriages, racing or galloping after foxes on the hunts of the elite, Orlov trotters were bred to be fast, sturdy, attractive and docile. They characteristically have long limbs and long backs, which lengthen their stride, and are known for their intelligence and obedience.


"We have partially blind horses who will walk through water or jump hurdles all the same," said the farm's head breeder, Lena Chizhova, 40. "An Orlov will do what he's told to do. That's 100 percent certain."


The Orlov trotters were first bred more than 200 years ago when Count Grigory Orlov mated an Arab and a Danish workhorse to create what breeders call Russia's "most beautiful and all-purpose horse." Today, there are more than 1,000 purebred Orlov brood mares in horse farms and hippodromes across Russia.


"This place, these beasts, they are my life," 46-year-old Kazmin said, leaning on his cane, which he has been using for a few months now since falling off a sulky and injuring his knee. "Why else would I dress up in these dirty, rotting jeans and muck around in the mud every day for no pay?" Stuttering with excitement, he explains that he came to Khrenovskoi after getting a degree in zoo technology. But, in working with horses, he'd rather use reins than needles. He fills his days driving his horses from behind in a two-wheeled carriage called a sulky or, in the winter, a sled. The ideal, he said, is to get the trotters to keep their heads down, to concentrate their power and speed in their hind legs, and to obey the slight twitches he transmits to their bits.


As Kazmin speaks, he watches a couple of Orlov trotters in outside corrals pace neurotically along one side of their iron-bar enclosure. As with most Orlovs, they are gray in color, with streamlined heads and large black eyes. On this unusually cool July morning, they are fresh and alert, snorting and whinnying shrilly to each other. Inside the stables, the horses in their stalls hear the call and chime in once more. But as the stalls are filled one by one with pitchforks-full of green hay, the neighs are replaced with the sounds of concentrated munching.


The horses don't know it, but today is a big day. German horse dealer Rudy H--ber is here to pick out the last of 16 horses he will buy and take back to Germany. Khrenovskoi badly needs H--ber's business, after a yearlong drought in sales because of the European Union's ban on Russian horse imports. The ban, imposed in July 1996 after six of Russia's 89 regions reported an equine arthritis epidemic, resulted in a $4 million loss for Russia over the year, Interfax quoted the Russian Agriculture Ministry as saying last month . Russia exports some 2,000 purebred horses in a typical year.


Khrenovskoi had already managed to export 46 horses in 1996 before the ban was imposed. But they, too, lost about $50,000, said Khrenovskoi director Mikhail Asakhov.


"That effectively is the amount I would need to pay salaries for a year," he said. The farm is not just in horse breeding, but also includes pig, cow, milk, grain and sunflower oil enterprises. For the past year, the company's 700 or so workers, 150 of whom are at the horse farm, have been paid literally in bread and butter.


Because of high taxes and little cash revenue, Khrenovskoi, like many businesses, has fallen into debt and had its bank accounts frozen. Khrenovskoi does 80 percent of its business in barter deals, for example, trading a simple workhorse for gasoline, or a filly for oats. It costs about a dollar a day to feed and keep the more than 650 horses at Khrenovskoi. If the stable can sell 100 horses a year, at an average of 10 million rubles ($1,720) each, Asakhov said, they are doing well.


Asakhov hopes the stigma resulting from the ban will not linger and that potential European customers share the philosophy of the German, H--ber, who said, "People get crazy about bloodlines and nationalities. But a good horse has no mother, no father and no country. A good horse is just a good horse."


H--ber is the first European to visit Khrenovskoi since the ban was lifted June 13. A short, plump man with a pile of brown curls on his head and a mustache that twirls into two sharp points, H--ber has been here for two weeks, checking horses' gaits, listening to their breathing, eyeing their teeth and testing their obedience to the rein. He is choosing which Orlovs to take home and resell from his stable in Stuhr, northwest Germany. Each year, he buys and sells about 150 horses, keeping an average of 30 in his stables at one time. H--ber has come because the Orlovs, he said, are unbeatable in grace and intelligence. They are exactly what he needs in his horses, which he uses to compete in dressage events and pull carriages in pairs.


"[The Orlovs] are brazenly strong and capricious, just like the Russian women," said H--ber, who is married to a Ukranian woman. "You get to know them and you are in heaven. They occupy your mind and you can't sleep. And they will rarely turn on you. But boy, can they be aggressive." If H--ber opens a stall door and the caged horse rushes to greet him, he automatically rules the horse out. "I don't need to deal with any more strong personalities."


But what should have been a routine business deal has turned into another potential disaster. It is enough to indefinitely delay H--ber's return home and to turn his face beet-red with anger. The customs officials will not issue him export papers. They demand that H--ber pay his $25,000 to Khrenovskoi through their bank account. But because of Khrenovskoi's outstanding debts, the account is frozen. Any money transferred to it will be seized by the government.


"It is the wicked way our government works," Asakhov said. "Most of the country is working with frozen accounts, and so we end up doing 90 percent of our business with barters, so as to leave the government out of it. But this is a real problem. We need this money, but the last thing we want is for him to pay the bank, because the government will take all the money and we will never see a kopek."


So H--ber and his horses sit at Khrenovskoi while Asakhov's staff wrangles with officials for paperwork and time runs out. If H--ber doesn't get his export documents, he will try to go through Lithuania and get papers there. It is these bureaucratic obstacles, he said, that make him never want to return for more Orlovs. The process of getting them back to Germany is, as he puts it, "hell."


"But then, after working with them in Germany for a few months and seeing the over 100 percent profits turn," he said, rolling his mustache ends between two fingertips, "I find myself already planning my next trip back to this crazy place."


Khrenovskoi, a few hours drive south of Voronezh, was founded in 1776 by Count Orlov as a place to breed his famed Orlov trotter. Orlov still presides here in the form of a life-size bust standing in the center of Khrenovskoi's main racing track.


Everyone at Khrenovskoi knows the legend of how the first trotter was conceived. One day, Orlov was riding in a carriage with his empress and lover, Catherine the Great. Suddenly, the imperial carriage jerked to a halt. Orlov stepped out of the carriage and found that Catherine's fancy team of horses simply had refused to continue. Orlov hiked to a nearby tavern and brought back a team of haggard workhorses to hook to the empress' coach to continue the trip.


Orlov, a horse breeder by hobby, set about breeding a horse that would carry its load. Conveniently, the Sultan of Turkey had given Orlov a sleek gray Arabian stallion, whom Orlov named Smetanka. Orlov mated him with a Danish workhorse, which resulted in Polkan, who was still a bit too skittish in personality for Orlov's ideal. Polkan was then mated with a stout Dutch mare, and, in 1784, the first Orlov trotter, Bars, was born.


Bars went on to sire 19 baby trotters, thus starting the world's first line of trotters. They were both sturdy and fast, running a mile in about 1 minute, 58 seconds. Their good looks made them showy, and they soon became prestigious beasts, symbolizing high society and good taste. Most important to Orlov, though, they were bred to obey. Orlov, himself a strapping and temperamental man, was intolerant of capriciousness in his steeds. He would never use a disobedient or stupid horse in breeding, even if the horse's form and speed were exceptional, said head breeder Chizhova.


It is the Orlov's well-known beauty and disposition that brought Sergei Budarin, 28, and Vladimir Litvinov, 30, from Orenburg, Siberia, to Khrenovskoi. They know Khrenvoskoi's reputation as the center for Orlov breeding and have come to buy a mare and a stallion, each for 10 million rubles, in hopes of starting their own breeding business back at their stable called Sputnik. Though they have been already in the business for a few years, these will be their first Orlovs.


"It has always been my dream to come here," Budarin said softly, dragging on a cigarette. "I have a few magazines with pictures of the buildings here. And here they are. Look over there," he said, pointing to the yellow paint-chipped main barn with a clock on its wall. "That's one of them."


Budarin is a trainer himself, and for a few years has been breeding Russian trotters, a Soviet-era mix between Orlov trotters and American trotters. Soviet breeders mixed the two breeds in the middle of this century to create a faster trotter, one that might match the American's speed. The Russian trotters, though, are only a few seconds faster than the Orlovs, and still trail the Americans, which are first in the world in speed. The French trotter is the second fastest.


Budarin doesn't like the Russian trotters as much. "They're not as smart, not as pretty, and, well, they're not Orlovs. I came here because, well, this is Khrenovskoi. Here is where you find the best."


Domestic buyers like Budarin are rare, but the farm still might reach its goal of selling 100 head this year. During Soviet times, this was easily met by demands within the U.S.S.R. for reliable work or sport horses. Today, the farm is lucky if it sells half that domestically. Ten years ago the price of an Orlov equaled the price of a new Zhiguli. Today, Khrenovskoi would need to sell five Orlovs to buy one Zhiguli.


"Most [agricultural farms] are trying to figure out how to pay their workers. How can they think about buying new horses?" said Boris Antonstov, director of Konnevodstvo Rossii, a nationwide union based in Moscow that was once part of the Agriculture Ministry. Equestrian sports, he said, are also less affordable. While the number of Russia's hippodromes, or race tracks, has remained stable at 39, the cost of boarding has skyrocketed, according to Antontsov.


Defying economic logic, Antonsov said, the number of Russian breeding farms having 60 stallions or more has grown from 64 to 76 since 1991. And smaller private breeders are popping up all over the map, Antonsov said.


When the animals at Khrenovoskoi start to eat the profits, the stable is forced to look for other options. Horses that might be healthy but that have cosmetic or physical defects, like a neck that is too long or a limp in the hind leg, are sold to the meat factory.


"We would gladly sell them to the local farms. But they have no money to pay. The meat factory can pay more," said Chizhova.


But the local farms end up with the Khrenovskoi horses anyway, she assured. Khrenovskoi will sell a trotter for 1.5 million rubles to the meat factory, while a local farm follows behind with its old and beaten nag. In effect, the local farmers will switch the trotter for the nag and walk away happy.


"It's all just papers anyway, a matter of a little bribe and some paper shuffling. And it's so much better for me to see that our horses don't end up on the sausage shelf. That is so painful," Chizhova said. Horse sausage sells for 2,750 rubles a kilogram, significantly cheaper than beef sausage and a steal compared to the original asking price of a living, snorting 500-kilogram Orlov trotter.


Even with the bank account frozen, salaries skimped on and equipment rusting, the director is optimistic. "It's just a rough spot in the economy, bound to blow over," Asakhov said. "The horses will pull us out of it."


Jockey Olisya Prokhorova will find a way to ride and compete no matter what. Prokhorova, an 18-year-old who looks no older than 14, came to Khrenovskoi six months ago from Chelyabinsk for the thrill. Before running the farm's Arabs at breakneck speed, she did karate, bobsledding, skydiving and anything else that gave her a rush. The very least of her worries now is whether or not she can support herself with this new career. "How can I even pretend to know what will happen? I am happy now," she said.


At Prokhorova's age, Natalya Basharina, too, had just joined the Khrenovskoi staff. Today, the 75-year-old horsewoman recalls her own youth on the farm. Back then, she said, metal buckets were replaced before they rusted and monuments larger than life were built to champion horses like the snow-white Orlov trotter, Ulov, who in 1939 broke world records running the 6,400-meter carriage race in 9 minutes 17.75 seconds. Now one of the oldest among the farm's veterans, Basharina spends her days growing vegetables instead of horses. She lives in the home of Countess Anna Orlova, Grigory's daughter who inherited the farm. The crumbing yellow one-story home in the center of the farm is surrounded by a white concrete fence, overgrown tomato plants and hanging laundry. In the front yard, Basharina swings an ax through the air, splitting a log into slivers to make support sticks for her tomato plants.


"I was a hero to the people, a very good rider once," she said, looking off into the trees. "I came here when I was 14 or so, after the war separated me from my parents. They simply disappeared, and so I made these stables, these people and these animals my home."


Ten meters from her home in the farm's museum, Basharina's photograph, taken in her 20s, hangs next to showmanship medals and horse portraits. Near it is another photo of a barn's interior half a century ago, just as she remembers it. As her leathery liver-spotted face no longer resembles the fresh look in her portrait, neither do the barn aisles of Khrenovskoi today match those in the framed photograph. In the picture the aisles are raked clean, the wood freshly painted and hewn. On each stall door hangs a new halter and a gleaming metal water bucket.


Though the farm's workers have done a bit of cosmetic work here and there with new paint and some flower beds, they are hoping the government will recognize the stable's status as a historical monument and subsidize renovation. One of the first buildings to be worked on will be Basharina's home. Watching the old woman tie her tomato plants to upright sticks, the museum director, Raisa Kostyukova, 36, said, "She is an old woman, and has been here maybe longer than anyone. But soon she will die. When she does, there is capital renovation planned for the building she lives in."