Sleigh Revival

Sleighs have a well-deserved place in Russian history and folklore. Who doesn’t know the proverb: “Prepare your cart in winter and your sleigh, in summer”? Or the advisory: “Don’t sit in someone else’s sleigh” (“Ne v svoi sani ne sadis,” meaning “don’t bite off more than you can chew”)? And of course there is Nikolai Gogol’s oft-quoted reference to fast drivers: “What Russian doesn’t like fast riding?!”

So perhaps it is not surprising that sleighs are making a comeback. Sure, Russia’s newly-powerful and newly-rich still like their Mercedes 600-series sedans for getting about town. But a velvet-lined sleigh painted in traditional khokhloma colors is the ideal status symbol for zipping through snow-laden woods near your dacha.

The Moscow-based KSIOK factory is well placed to take advantage of this new trend. Founded 156 years ago to provide horse tackle for Prince Urusov, a famous horse breeder, it is today the top supplier of equine accessories in all Russia.

Of course, horses play a much less significant role in Russian life than they once did. Nearly a century ago, in 1916, Russia was the leading “horse power” in the world, with 38 million horses under harness. Throughout the 1920s, horses continued to play their critical role on the 20 million small farms spread out across Russia. But collectivization (1930-1934), which compressed these 20 million into 240,000 collective farms, took an awesome toll. Peasants slaughtered their livestock rather than turn them over to a collective farm, or they simply let their horses run free or die because they could not be fed. Those horses that did make it into collective farms were poorly taken care of, overworked and underfed. As a result, by 1935, Russia’s horse population had been more than halved, to 14.9 million. By 1940, that number had risen only slightly, to just under 18 million.

In the Soviet era, KSIOK was called Semyon Budyonny’s Saddle and Harness Making Factory—named for the legendary head of the Red Army’s First Cavalry. A significant force in the Civil War, the cavalry declined in military importance through the 1930s. But its political importance was significant: many of the top brass that survived Stalin’s 1937 purge of the military (Georgi Zhukov, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Timoshenko and Budyonny himself) were associated with the First Cavalry—that corps had aided Stalin in his Civil War insubordination of Trotsky’s leadership.

By the mid-1930s, the Red Army was mechanizing, yet it still relied heavily on the infantry and on horses to pull equipment. But the effects of collectivization and the needs of a famine-wracked country meant that horses were harder and harder to come by. The army’s expansion and mobilization were seriously hampered: At the beginning of WWII, the army did not have enough horses to move its material, and those it did have were not the best quality.

Over the decades since WWII, horse populations in Russia fell to a now more or less stable level of two-and-a-half million. This decline led most Soviet cart makers and harness producers to switch to other types of production. But the Budyonny factory continued on, soon becoming the producer of all forms of tackle and saddlery. And not just for the important agrarian sector, but also for the few remaining specialized army cavalry units, for Olympic equestrians, jockeys, and even for the special film cavalry regiment at Mosfilm studios (see Russian Life, February 1997).

After the arrival of the market, the factory was transformed into a joint stock company owned by its workers. In 1997 the worker’s collective at the factory, which is just a stone’s throw from the capital’s Belorussky Railway Station, at Nizhnyaya ulitsa 14, held a general shareholders’ meeting and decided to withhold dividends for 10 years and invest all profits into development.

Over half of the 150 workers at KSIOK are long-serving employees. For example, Olga Agafonova and Galina Nazarchuk, both cutters in the harness workshop, joined the factory at the age of 14 and have worked here for over 50 years. Saddlemaker Anatoly Salikov has been here for 45 years.

Such veteran workers are reliable and know their profession well. But a healthy enterprise also needs a younger generation to carry on into the future. And since saddle- and harnessmaking are crafts that involve highly skilled manual labor, KSIOK needs a younger generation dedicated enough to hang in through long years of training.

Unfortunately, there is no school in Moscow which specializes in training harness- or saddle-makers. So KSIOK set up classes on-site, to prepare students themselves. One KSIOK pupil, Viktor Trifonov, was trained by Anatoly Salikov, and has been making saddles here for 28 years. But such cases are more the exception than the rule.

“We began producing sleighs in the 1990s, when the profile of our customers changed,” KSIOK’s Pyotr Gorlov said. “Demand determines supply. We produced sleighs in the past, but these were sleighs used in agriculture. These are sleighs for fun. Now we are seeing a huge number of well-off people who have horses of their own. Hence the change in our assortment. That’s why, starting from 1990, we launched production of individual, custom-made sleighs.”

Gorlov noted, cryptically, that KSIOK clients range “from presidents to wealthy persons.” Outside research showed that its clientele includes Boris Yeltsin, Viktor Chernomyrdin and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has several sleighs and a chariot. Several presidents beyond and within Russia’s borders have also ordered sleighs: Kazakstan’s Nursultan Nazarbaev, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, Tatarstan’s Mintimir Shaymiev, and Bashkiria’s Murtaza Rakhimov.

While Gorlov noted that “the President of Tatarstan prefers green” (a traditional color of Islam), and that Lukashenko preferred white with some blue (Belarus means “White Russia”), he said that the firm’s wealthy clients have more specific needs. The sleigh itself may be made from the finest southern Russian beech and ash, and the seats of leather, but such luxury is just the bare minimum: clients have ordered everything from automatic windows to custom audio systems.

While such custom sleighs can fetch upwards of $10,000, the more “typical” sleighs range from R25,500 to R55,000 ($900-2000), depending on the upholstery and number of seats. The smallest sleigh, intended for a pony, costs R15,000. A three-seater costs R25,000. The most luxurious three-seater with leather upholstery costs R40,000. For this price, one could pick up a second hand Lada car. But then people are not buying these to get around town. And, as the Russian proverb goes, “if you like riding in the sleigh, you must also like pulling it.”

KSIOK’s sleighs are in fact designed to be pulled by horses, usually two or three. But some wealthy clients will attach them to snowmobiles. Russian businessman Vladimir Veremeev set a record speed of 150 km per hour with just such a hookup.

Of course, you don’t have to be a rich Russian to have a yearning for a sleigh ride through a birch forest at any speed. Put on a fur hat, bundle up in a comfortable ovchinny tulup (Russian-style fur coat made of sheepskin), settle in for a ride and you feel like a real Russian barin. The snow flies off the sleigh runners ... the icy wind rushes by your ears ... the sights and smells of the forest whistle by like a multimedia kaleidoscope ... You are transported back in time and Gogol’s words float into your mind:

And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get into a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Nor love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it? It seems an unknown force has taken you on its wing, and you are flying, and everything is flying: milestones go flying by, merchants come flying at you on the boxes of their kibitkas, the forest on both sides is flying by with its dark ranks of firs and pines, with axes chopping and crows cawing, the whole road is flying off no one knows where into the vanishing distance, and there is something terrible in this quick flashing, in which the vanishing object has no time to fix itself—only the sky overhead, and the light clouds, and the moon trying to break through, they alone seem motionless. Ah troika! bird troika, who invented you? Surely you could only have been born among a brisk people, in a land that cares not for jokes but sweeps smoothly and evenly over half the world, and you can go on counting the miles until it all dances before your eyes. And you are no clever traveling outfit, it seems, held together by an iron screw, but some dextrous Yaroslav muzhik fitted you out and put you together slapdash, with only an axe and a chisel. ...  RL

End quote from Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (Vintage Classics Edition, 1997).

KSIOK can be contacted in Moscow, by fax, at: (095) 946-1936.