Myths about horses and in particular men riding horses abound in myths about Russian nationality, Bella Shapiro observes in the opening pages of this fundamental study. “The world is a horse,” (1) says one Russian proverb; in any book about iconic images of Russian life, you will find the Bronze Horseman, Gogol's firebird-troika, and a prince at the crossroads. Aiming her research at specialists in Russian cultural history, Shapiro sets out to “reconstruct not the history of the rider, but his image, in a historically dynamic way” (16). This means, in Shapiro's view, staking out an interdisciplinary territory between “the history of our Fatherland, the history of Russian culture, and imageology.” Shapiro believes that the iconography of riders on horses started deep in Russian history and was carried forward by this history to the end of the horse age and beyond. Having won a war powered by oil and electricity, Marshal Georgii Zhukov rode a white horse at the Victory Parade in June 1945. This “last apotheosis” of the rider showed how “how closely different historical epochs are intertwined, and with what power archaic images [predstavleniia] influence our Nation's cultural history” (464).
Shapiro's book rests on both a deep and a broad reading of horse culture in Russia. Adopting Nikolai Berdiaev's periodization of Russian history (Muscovite, Petrine, and Imperial), Shapiro divides the book into three corresponding sections. Although Part I (“The Muscovite Tsardom's Rider”) opens with iconographic analysis of images inherited by sixteenth century Russia, most of the book focuses on the equestrian history of Russia's court. Shapiro reconstructs how horses were ridden by Moscow's elite, and how both the horses and the riders on them were dressed and trained. There are chapters focused on individual riders (such as Tsar Fedor Alekseevich Romanov, and Nicholas I), as well as chapters focused on evolutions in the technique and material culture of horse riding (equestrianism proper). To frame these biographical and cultural historical chapters, Shapiro puts them in chronologies largely driven by political and military history. We learn about the interconnection between shifts in war-fighting (the evolution of cavalry, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century) and political reform. Most chapters line up with the reigns of specific emperors and empresses.
As a result, the book has a somewhat encyclopedic feel. While the material presented is often fascinating—and undoubtedly well-researched—this reader often had a hard time following the overarching, “historically-dynamic,” but continuing evolution Shapiro identifies as the book's main aim. For a work that sits on the edge of Tartu-school style “culturology,” it says surprisingly little about literary or artistic matters (outside of a wealth of information on equestrian costume and dressage). One result is that the history of the image of the rider—in the sense of an artistic meme that exists within society and is variously produced and received—sometimes seems submerged in a mass of equestrian and historical detail.
This has advantages, it should be said. While there are various essays (gathered in the fundamental bibliographies Shapiro provides) that try to understand the mysteries of the Horseman and the Troika, this book has the unique virtue of surveying the role of horses in Russian monarchy more completely than I have previously seen. Anyone trying to think about the meaning of horses in Russian “scenarios of power” over time would do well to consult it. In addition to its comprehensive bibliography, Shapiro's book also contains several hundred pages of appendices, publishing a wide range of historical materials.
If there is one clear narrative over time that comes through, it is one of acceleration. In the Tsardom of Muscovy, Shapiro observes, speed was thought to be “in an inverse relationship to the importance of the rider.” For this reason, “boyars on their horses rode out at a walking pace, with the bridle being held by their foot servants” (135). In the Petrine era and thereafter, however, royal riders took on the image of powerful, rapid attackers, reflecting an era where power was not so much held as taken by storm. If, as Shapiro contends, myths about horse-riders shape “the paradigm of power” in Russia (458), their evolution over time has yielded primarily “audacious horsemen, throwing their mounts into headlong attack” (464).
