By the 1870s, my chronological point of departure for remarks that will range across the following hundred years, the graphosphere as conceived by Simon Franklin had already coalesced into recognizably modern form. Its dependability as a “technology of authority” nevertheless remained uncertain. The focus here will be on various sorts of certification administered by the military authorities, by the State Horse-breeding Board (Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennogo konnozavodstva)—which in imperial Russia fulfilled most of the regulatory responsibilities exercised elsewhere in Europe by autonomous Jockey Clubs—and by the Board’s Soviet successor, GuKON (Glavnoe upravlenie konevodstva i konezavodstva pri Narkomzeme RSFSR). I shall argue that while print may have served these institutions as “a guarantor of documentary authenticity,” the genuineness of the horses themselves proved more elusive. It was harder to produce reliable identity documents for animals than for humans, and even when accurate pedigrees could be tendered in an industry notorious for unscrupulousness, they might still be open to challenge on ideological grounds.Footnote ¹

Three vignettes will serve to highlight the unanticipated consequences of state attempts to exploit the authority of the visible written word. The first touches on the social and economic impact of the army’s peacetime classification of peasant horses between the 1870s and 1920s. The second considers scandals in the elite horse-racing world at the beginning of the twentieth century, when imported American trotters were given false pedigrees to allow them to compete in harness races reserved for slower native animals. The third discusses Soviet horse exports in the 1960s and 70s, when the market trumped the graphosphere in every respect except one.

Established in the wake of the 1874 military reform, peacetime equine mobilization commissions sought to fill the gaps between periodic equine censuses, visiting multiple isolated localities to minimize popular resentment of interruptions to horses’ work.Footnote ² Prince Tenishev’s ethnographic investigation concluded that peasants generally attended willingly because any animal ranked highly by the inspectors automatically rose in value. The equal but opposite relief experienced by owners whose horses were judged unfit for service helped to sustain a festive mood. At Uloma volostʹ in Novgorod province, the presiding artillery officer called forward individuals in turn before completing his blank forms in front of the expectant assembly:

Once war and revolution had slashed the equine headcount from 35.8 million in 1916 to 21.1 million in 1922, the mood inevitably soured.Footnote ⁴ By spring 1921, when Lenin abandoned War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy (NEP), equine shortages had made questions of registration unprecedentedly acute. Collectives around Briansk possessed barely a third of the horses they needed, lacked the credit to buy more, and soon lost thirty of their best animals to the fire service.Footnote ⁵ In Tula and Riazanʹ provinces, it was the police who commandeered peasant horses, jailing their owners on charges of irregular paperwork.Footnote ⁶ Popularly known as konskie bilety (horse tickets) or konskie pasporty (horse passports), the Red Army’s equine uchetnye kartochki (registration cards) revived a deterrent to horse stealing first introduced in Muscovy, and which had most recently been advocated by zemstvo activists to Sergei Witte’s commission on agriculture in 1901.Footnote ⁷ In practice, the early Soviet experience confirmed the fears of pre-revolutionary critics who anticipated that equine identity documents, certified by the police or local administration to prevent thieves from making a quick sale, would be open to abuse.Footnote ⁸ Far from stabilizing the market, the value of the coveted white cards issued to animals deemed unfit for military service (superior horses received an undesirable red card) generated what Tracy McDonald has described as “a roaring business in counterfeit tickets and creative scams surrounding the documentation.”Footnote ⁹

Such rackets were by no means confined to the lower orders since, as my second vignette shows, pedigree horses depended even more heavily on certification than peasant horses. On purchasing a thoroughbred from a stud farm, nineteenth-century army remount officers demanded a signed and stamped certificate of its origin. Without such credentials, claims made by seller or dealer were to be ignored.Footnote ¹⁰ Authentication remained crucial at every step of the animal’s subsequent military career. When the officers’ steeplechases made famous by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were established in 1867, entrants required certificates of origin to allow a winner’s breeder to receive his share of the prize money.Footnote ¹¹ The same motive applied in spades from the 1880s, when mass gambling fueled by the totalizator generated a cash-rich racing industry managed by largely autonomous civilian societies under the aegis of the State Horse-breeding Board. By the end of the century, the Board had approved detailed regulations requiring proof of everything from a racehorse’s age to the color of its coat.Footnote ¹² Most controversial of all in an era dominated by the rivalry between American and Russian trotting horses was the need for evidence of an animal’s national origin.Footnote ¹³

The greatest graphospheric scandals were caused by “ringers”: American standardbreds fraudulently represented as Orlov trotters to gain advantage in races restricted to Russian-born entrants distinguished by strength rather than speed. In 1901, the State Board went to elaborate lengths to expose Oslund L., a Minnesota bay sold to Russia through a leading Viennese dealer and subsequently raced as a Russian horse.Footnote ¹⁴ Following inquiries by the Russian consul in Chicago, the National Trotting Association arranged for the horse’s former American trainer to identify him in Moscow: “I knew it was old Oslund the moment I saw him,” the trainer wrote to his wife, “and that is all there was to it.”Footnote ¹⁵ While this case was settled out of court, charges against the owner and breeder of a second “ringer” became a national cause-célèbre in September 1903, three years after a gray stallion burst onto the scene under the name of Rassvet (Dawn).Footnote ¹⁶ Owned by a young Kherson landowner, Aleksandr Shishkin, and bred by the brother of the celebrated stud farmer, Iakov Butovich, Rassvet won 23,000 rubles in his first season and broke the trotting record by a cool two seconds. When these improbable triumphs inevitably prompted speculation that the animal was not what he seemed, suspicion fell on William C. K., another American import via Vienna. In a packed Moscow courtroom, the prosecuting counsel, Nikolai Shubinskii, a leader of the pro-American faction in Russian trotting and subsequently a prominent Octobrist, insisted that no Russian horse could run so fast.Footnote ¹⁷ The defense relied on the future Kadet Vasilii Maklakov, who later recalled the “fanatical adherents and outright liars” on both sides of a case in which the key point of public interest was not the innocence or guilt of the accused, but whether the horse was Russian or American.Footnote ¹⁸ In the event, no witness was summoned from abroad and the judge dismissed the charges, complaining of contradictory expert evidence. Butovich later claimed that if only his brother had admitted Shishkin’s fraud to Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the influential president of the St. Petersburg Trotting Society, the case would have been struck out.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, it remained long in the memory, fictionalized in 1907 by the writer Aleksandr Kuprin in his “Izumrud” (Emerald), a story told through the horse’s mouth in homage to Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer.”Footnote ²⁰ The State Horse-breeding Board subsequently redoubled its efforts to investigate dubious lineages. But in the 1920s, when horse-racing seemed to exemplify the seamier side of NEP’s get-rich-quick culture, readers of Ilʹf and Petrov’s Dvenadtsatʹ stulʹev (The Twelve Chairs, 1928) might have been tempted to put contemporary faces to the name of Count Drutskii, a fictional pre-revolutionary fixer sentenced to three years in prison for disguising his American cross-breed as an Orlov trotter and giving it a false pedigree.Footnote ²¹

Ironically, not even impeccable pedigrees could benefit the Tersk stud in the 1960s, when its export potential in the market for elite Arabians was rapidly identified.Footnote ²² The Dutch horsemeat dealer, Ronald den Hartog, bought his first Tersk stallion in 1959 and his Kossack Stud (founded near Amsterdam in 1965 and still flourishing under the control of his son) became the main continental outlet.Footnote ²³ In 1975, twelve years after the first Tersk horses went to the United States, American buyers snapped up fifteen of them at Stavropolʹ, paying a record $20,000 for a single broodmare.Footnote ²⁴ Yet average prices were depressed by the ideologically-motivated refusal of the Arabian Horse Club Registry of America (AHCRA) to register horses imported from the USSR on the nominal grounds that their certification was untrustworthy. Owners protested the illogicality of a policy that simultaneously recognized horses purchased from communist Poland, although they, too, originated in the Caucasus. But under the leadership of Daniel C. Gainey, treasurer to Senator Barry Goldwater’s Republican campaign for the presidency in 1964, the AHRCA remained resolutely anti-Soviet.Footnote ²⁵ Not until Gainey’s death in 1978 could American owners hope to sell their Soviet purchases at a premium. Only then could Soviet breeders again dream of “Tersk gold.”Footnote ²⁶

While the fate of Tersk Arabian exports marked a perverse triumph for the graphosphere over the market, economics otherwise trumped the graphosphere. Despite the Soviet horse industry’s conviction that profits from exports were potentially “limitless,” the reality was different.Footnote ²⁷ Showing off the First Moscow Stud to Fidel Castro in January 1964, Nikita Khrushchev boasted that each pedigree horse sold would pay for up to five imported dairy cows.Footnote ²⁸ But although a Rostov stud director assured the Party’s Central Committee that foreign sales had made his breeding operation profitable, the New York Times counted “virtually no foreign buyer” at the first international horse fair at the Exhibition of National Economic Achievement (VDNKh) in July 1962.Footnote ²⁹ The exception was the émigré fur-dealer Peter Provatoroff, on whom the Soviets relied to sell mediocre hunters in Britain. So great was the Soviet dependence on this single individual that his death in December 1963 not only punctured the British operation but depressed the annual international auctions in the USSR. Though they continued into the twenty-first century (conducted online during the Covid pandemic), they moved in 1971 to the relative obscurity of the First Moscow Stud, supplemented by sales at Rostov-on-Don, Stavropolʹ, and Piatigorsk.Footnote ³⁰ While brilliant western-facing Soviet publicity targeted a shrinking hunting fraternity in the English-speaking world, clients attracted by low prices came mostly from continental Europe and Scandinavia. It was all a far cry from the “living gold” subsequently described in a fanciful account by the USSR’s leading equestrian writer, Dmitrii Urnov.Footnote ³¹ Disguising Provatoroff as “Vaska Wijewatoff” and claiming that his family had been involved in Anglo-Russian trade since the time of Ivan the Terrible, Urnov falsely alleged that the Soviet champion jockey, Nikolai Nasibov, who never visited England, participated in a grand auction parade alongside the famous British trainer, Sir Gordon Richards.Footnote ³²

These contrasting fragments represent but a pale reflection of Simon Franklin’s dazzling kaleidoscope. Nevertheless, taken collectively, all three serve to emphasize the lasting and often unintended economic impact of the visible written word. Almost everything to do with horses has always been connected with money. The graphosphere is no exception to the rule.