Akhal Teke UK
"The Manege"
By Maria Marquise
Growing up in a 1960s Moscow urban sprawl, in a family with no interest in sport of any kind
and no country connections, the only horses I would have seen before my first visit to the
Moscow State Hippodrome Manege at the age of eight were the bronze Renaissance mounts
at the Museum of Fine Arts. The woman who got me hooked was a passing acquaintance of
my parents’; she thought she was doing them a favour by offering me to come along to watch
her ride. I remember very little about her other than that she was my namesake. I only met her
twice and later heard she died, still in her thirties, from a brain tumor, allegedly related to a
riding accident.
The Manege boasted an Olympic-size indoor arena with seating for 800 people and housed
120 horses stabled along a single long corridor which seemed to go on for miles. Each stable
had a plaque above it, with the name of the horse, its year and place of birth, the breed and
the name of its sire and dam. The rules of the riding school stated that no children under ten
years of age were allowed to take lessons, however, in a typically Soviet fashion, these were
habitually ignored: it was common knowledge that you could lie about your age and no
questions would be asked. Still, Mum decided to go by the rules, so for two years I was
consigned to the spectators’ gallery. It was not that she was worried about safety (she never
even visited the place). Nor was it a question of expense: the school was a state-run concern
and lessons cost a pittance. More likely, imposing a temporary ban on riding lessons afforded
Mum the one and only chance to exert her parental authority over her terribly sensible child
who otherwise hardly ever begged for things or craved forbidden fruit.
It was frustrating to watch the other under-tens ride but I didn’t waste my time in that gallery.
Listening avidly to instructions and re-living other people’s failures, I stored up knowledge for
that coveted first lesson. It must have been my proudest moment when I was able to rise in
trot from the first attempt - the result of hours of practice at home, while parents were at
work, on an ingenious contraption of sofa cushions tied together, with Dad’s belts attached on
each side as stirrups.
Unfortunately, passing the tenth birthday mark went little way to satisfy my equestrian passion.
The journey to The Manege took nearly two hours by bus and tube and with the three music
lessons a week to attend on top of school, it was never under consideration that I would be
allowed to ride in term-time. School holidays – a maximum of twice a week - were to be my
only chance, the long summer holidays excluded as they were usually spent away from the
city. The problem about riding in the school holidays, apart from the obvious one of disastrous
infrequency, was that Moscow - a city with eleven million population - had only two riding
schools. So, come the end-of term, they were teeming with pony-mad children.
The lessons commenced at 9 am and, thanks to the generous size of the arena, two or three
groups of ten-to-fifteen people were often taught simultaneously but even this impressive
turnover could not accommodate the numbers. In order to get on a morning ride I had to
catch the first tube at 6 am which meant being up at four and walking the length of what
normally would be a twenty-minute bus journey from our house to the underground station, as
no buses ran at that hour. Needless to say it was dark and, for the most part of the school
year, very cold. The streets were deserted, knee-deep in snow, and the snow ploughs would
be only just out. As I dosed on the train, the snow on my clothes would gradually melt and
seep into my boots. By the time I walked from the underground station to the riding school,
taking a shortcut through the racecourse where trotting horses were being led out for their
morning exercise, it was after seven and a queue of shivering youngsters had already formed
on the icy square in front of The Manege. A list was being kept with everyone’s name and a
roll-call conducted regularly, to prevent those lucky few who lived around the corner from
nipping back home for some warmth and a quick breakfast. There was nowhere to sit down,
nor would you have wanted to in temperatures of -20C. The wake continued until the school
opened shortly before nine, and being usually around seventieth on the list, I rarely got to ride
before eleven. This was the most trying time of all, as by this stage I was completely
exhausted as well as impatient and it was hard to know how to pass the time. No such luxury
as stable duties were on offer: the school employed old grumpy men as grooms who sat in a
dingy room playing cards and swearing violently. They hated little girls coming to ask sweetly
to be allowed to brush a horse. There was no social life either: with the children coming from
different parts of the city there was never any chance of getting to know anyone.
At the end of each hour, the steadily reducing queue would line up in the lobby, with
everybody clutching a piece of thin brown paper in their hands. It was the school’s
requirement that everyone attended a single-hour Theory session prior to commencing the
riding proper and retained a certificate bearing witness to one’s basic knowledge of equine
anatomy, how to tack up a horse and absolving the riding school from legal responsibilities.
The Soviet bureaucracy took a much more rigid stance on Theory than it did on the no-under-
tens rule, and not having a certificate invariably meant no ride.
The queue of certificate holders stretched towards a small window with a hatch through which
the head instructor Rosa Georgievna - a formidable matron with a husky voice - took money
and after much deliberation over an enormous spreadsheet, announced the name of your
horse. It was then up to you to make your way to the stables and along the corridor, turning
your head from side to side till it hurt, in search of the right animal. If you were unlucky enough
to get one at the very end of the corridor who was also less than amenable to being tacked
up, you arrived late for the lesson, often missing - oh woe! - the first trot. There was never
any help with saddling up, not even for beginners. The theory lesson was supposed to have
taken care of that. Some of the horses had terrible stable manners. If you were lucky you
might be able to secure help - usually in the form of moral support - from another helpless
young rider who looked at you sympathetically while you were trying to get past those
threatening hind quarters.
The lessons themselves consisted of basic flatwork - walk, trot and canter with a few reign
changes, quadrilles and serpentines. Rosa Georgievna sat high up in the gallery with a
megaphone and gave instructions, interspersed with terms of abuse provoked by our
indisputable incompetence. Her approach to teaching may have dented our confidence but it
failed to extinguish our passion for riding.
Most of the horses, as I realise now, must have been the rejects from the bizarre world of
Soviet Sport. They tended to fall into two categories: the shrewd stubborn asses whose sole
aim in life was to avoid moving at all and the lunatic types who behaved like they had colics.
Riding hats were unheard of - the only people who wore them were the children of foreign
diplomats who came for private lessons. Accidents were common, falling off being mildly
preferable to standing at X for the duration of the lesson in full view of the spectating public.
Bucking and rearing were generally agreed to be the least scary vices, followed by kicking
and biting in the stables, with the dreaded bolting topping the list. When a horse bolted, Rosa
Georgievna would stop the ride and we would all sit on our horses motionless, holding our
breath and watching one crazed animal dart across the arena at sharp angles, first with its rider
on and then without. I can still remember the eerie silence that filled the vast glass-encased
space on these occasions.
The Union of Writers’ Sanatorium where I spent summers with my grandmother was situated
some two hundred miles outside Moscow. The once rural region was increasingly becoming a
holiday spot but in the few surrounding villages peasant farmers still kept cart horses. Faced
with a prospect of no riding lessons until October, I thought it no great loss to try my luck with
the farmers. I noticed that one old man regularly went past the Sanatorium grounds in his cart,
so I waited at the gate and asked if he would let me ride. He probably thought it odd and
unbecoming that a female child with an urban accent should be chatting him up in such a
shameless fashion, so most of the time he just ignored me. It was all the more to my
astonishment when one day he responded to my usual opening line “Uncle Joe, will you let me
ride your horse?” with an offer:
“My broodmare’d walked off with her foal the other day, I’m on my way to get her now. If
you want, you can come along in the cart and ride her on the way back.” It had to be a quick
decision: with no time to change out of my cotton-print shorts, nor to ask to be allowed to go
(and who would have let me ride off in a cart with a strange man anyway?), I forced all
thoughts of dire consequences out of my mind and climbed in. We drove a fair distance
before getting to the place where another farmer had apprehended the errant mare. She was
dappled grey, all skin-and-bones, a sad old nag struggling to feed her offspring. The old man
tied a rope to her headcollar, helped me onto her protruding spine and back we went, at a
weary trot, with the foal behind, along the bumpy country road. He appeared to be taking a
longer route and stopped at a farm to load something into the cart. By then my discomfort had
become so severe that I was able to summon courage and plead for a sack cloth to be laid
across the mare’s back in the absence of a saddle but stopped short of asking to be let back
into the cart. When we finally reached the Sanatorium grounds the sun was beginning to set. I
knew I had missed supper. Numb with pain and fear, I was ready to face the music. The
search was called off and I was taken to the health centre where the doctor subjected me to
rigorous and humiliating questioning before treating my wounds. The next day, as I was
sheepishly walking around the grounds hoping that the story of my escapades wouldn’t get
around, one of the Sanatorium residents, a grand old lady in firs who vaguely knew me as a
girl who came into the main hall to practice the piano every morning, greeted me with a
disarming smile: “Oh, it was a most splendid sight yesterday at sunset, my dear, you on your
grand white horse!”
With the summer over, it was back to school and music lessons, to drawing horses in art
classes and on the inside covers of textbooks, and long intervals without riding. I took out a
subscription to Pferd Und Sport - an East German equestrian magazine printed on poor
quality paper with blurred black-and-white photographs which I cut out to decorate my
bedroom. I tried to ask Grandmother who was a native speaker of Yiddish to translate the
articles for me but the convoluted lingo of the Eastern Block sport journalism proved less than
straightforward for her to tackle, and was too much like the stuff of which Pravda newspaper
was made for me to insist. Apart from the episode with the farmer’s horse, my only other act
of recklessness was to lie to Grandmother about going to practice at the music school one day
while instead I escaped to The Manege: I had been off-school, recovering from a flu and the
opportunity of riding on a weekday morning in term-time when, I knew, the riding school
would be empty was too tempting to miss. Unfortunately, Gran decided to phone the music
school to check with my piano teacher if I got there safely.
On one of my recent trips to Moscow I suddenly decided to go and see if the old place was
still there. After struggling to remember the way to the Hippodrome along the streets of
Moscow which have changed beyond recognition in recent years, and having to ask a passer-
by, I eventually found the shortcut to the racecourse, and retraced my steps of 25 years ago
to the glass structure, now covered in grey mould and looking run down. The entrance was
boarded up but I noticed a makeshift sign “The Manege”, pointing towards what looked like a
building-site barracks. I walked up the ramp and found myself in the stables, with not a soul in
sight. A timetable pinned to a notice board announced that lessons were available on
Thursdays only. After wandering around for while, I knocked on one of the doors. A woman
in her thirties came out, looking like she was suffering from a bad hangover, and asked me
wearily what I wanted. I started to explain that I rode here as a child, that I was now living in
England and had just started riding again after all those years... Did she, perhaps, know the
teacher called Rosa Georgievna?
“Rosa Georgievna is dead”.
“Oh dear... I am only in Moscow for a few days to visit my grandmother but could I maybe
come and ride, just for old times’ sake?”
“Yes, that’s alright, you can come on Thursday but make sure you bring your Theory
certificate. Have you attended Theory?”
I swallowed hard: “Yes, I certainly did back then but it’s been over 25 years! I haven’t got
the certificate anymore”.
“Well, you should try to find it. You can’t ride without Theory”.
“Honestly, I don’t think I have it anymore.”
“Well, in that case you will have to attend it again. We only do Theory on Mondays.”
My flight back to England was leaving on Sunday afternoon.
By Maria Marquise
Growing up in a 1960s Moscow urban sprawl, in a family with no interest in sport of any kind
and no country connections, the only horses I would have seen before my first visit to the
Moscow State Hippodrome Manege at the age of eight were the bronze Renaissance mounts
at the Museum of Fine Arts. The woman who got me hooked was a passing acquaintance of
my parents’; she thought she was doing them a favour by offering me to come along to watch
her ride. I remember very little about her other than that she was my namesake. I only met her
twice and later heard she died, still in her thirties, from a brain tumor, allegedly related to a
riding accident.
The Manege boasted an Olympic-size indoor arena with seating for 800 people and housed
120 horses stabled along a single long corridor which seemed to go on for miles. Each stable
had a plaque above it, with the name of the horse, its year and place of birth, the breed and
the name of its sire and dam. The rules of the riding school stated that no children under ten
years of age were allowed to take lessons, however, in a typically Soviet fashion, these were
habitually ignored: it was common knowledge that you could lie about your age and no
questions would be asked. Still, Mum decided to go by the rules, so for two years I was
consigned to the spectators’ gallery. It was not that she was worried about safety (she never
even visited the place). Nor was it a question of expense: the school was a state-run concern
and lessons cost a pittance. More likely, imposing a temporary ban on riding lessons afforded
Mum the one and only chance to exert her parental authority over her terribly sensible child
who otherwise hardly ever begged for things or craved forbidden fruit.
It was frustrating to watch the other under-tens ride but I didn’t waste my time in that gallery.
Listening avidly to instructions and re-living other people’s failures, I stored up knowledge for
that coveted first lesson. It must have been my proudest moment when I was able to rise in
trot from the first attempt - the result of hours of practice at home, while parents were at
work, on an ingenious contraption of sofa cushions tied together, with Dad’s belts attached on
each side as stirrups.
Unfortunately, passing the tenth birthday mark went little way to satisfy my equestrian passion.
The journey to The Manege took nearly two hours by bus and tube and with the three music
lessons a week to attend on top of school, it was never under consideration that I would be
allowed to ride in term-time. School holidays – a maximum of twice a week - were to be my
only chance, the long summer holidays excluded as they were usually spent away from the
city. The problem about riding in the school holidays, apart from the obvious one of disastrous
infrequency, was that Moscow - a city with eleven million population - had only two riding
schools. So, come the end-of term, they were teeming with pony-mad children.
The lessons commenced at 9 am and, thanks to the generous size of the arena, two or three
groups of ten-to-fifteen people were often taught simultaneously but even this impressive
turnover could not accommodate the numbers. In order to get on a morning ride I had to
catch the first tube at 6 am which meant being up at four and walking the length of what
normally would be a twenty-minute bus journey from our house to the underground station, as
no buses ran at that hour. Needless to say it was dark and, for the most part of the school
year, very cold. The streets were deserted, knee-deep in snow, and the snow ploughs would
be only just out. As I dosed on the train, the snow on my clothes would gradually melt and
seep into my boots. By the time I walked from the underground station to the riding school,
taking a shortcut through the racecourse where trotting horses were being led out for their
morning exercise, it was after seven and a queue of shivering youngsters had already formed
on the icy square in front of The Manege. A list was being kept with everyone’s name and a
roll-call conducted regularly, to prevent those lucky few who lived around the corner from
nipping back home for some warmth and a quick breakfast. There was nowhere to sit down,
nor would you have wanted to in temperatures of -20C. The wake continued until the school
opened shortly before nine, and being usually around seventieth on the list, I rarely got to ride
before eleven. This was the most trying time of all, as by this stage I was completely
exhausted as well as impatient and it was hard to know how to pass the time. No such luxury
as stable duties were on offer: the school employed old grumpy men as grooms who sat in a
dingy room playing cards and swearing violently. They hated little girls coming to ask sweetly
to be allowed to brush a horse. There was no social life either: with the children coming from
different parts of the city there was never any chance of getting to know anyone.
At the end of each hour, the steadily reducing queue would line up in the lobby, with
everybody clutching a piece of thin brown paper in their hands. It was the school’s
requirement that everyone attended a single-hour Theory session prior to commencing the
riding proper and retained a certificate bearing witness to one’s basic knowledge of equine
anatomy, how to tack up a horse and absolving the riding school from legal responsibilities.
The Soviet bureaucracy took a much more rigid stance on Theory than it did on the no-under-
tens rule, and not having a certificate invariably meant no ride.
The queue of certificate holders stretched towards a small window with a hatch through which
the head instructor Rosa Georgievna - a formidable matron with a husky voice - took money
and after much deliberation over an enormous spreadsheet, announced the name of your
horse. It was then up to you to make your way to the stables and along the corridor, turning
your head from side to side till it hurt, in search of the right animal. If you were unlucky enough
to get one at the very end of the corridor who was also less than amenable to being tacked
up, you arrived late for the lesson, often missing - oh woe! - the first trot. There was never
any help with saddling up, not even for beginners. The theory lesson was supposed to have
taken care of that. Some of the horses had terrible stable manners. If you were lucky you
might be able to secure help - usually in the form of moral support - from another helpless
young rider who looked at you sympathetically while you were trying to get past those
threatening hind quarters.
The lessons themselves consisted of basic flatwork - walk, trot and canter with a few reign
changes, quadrilles and serpentines. Rosa Georgievna sat high up in the gallery with a
megaphone and gave instructions, interspersed with terms of abuse provoked by our
indisputable incompetence. Her approach to teaching may have dented our confidence but it
failed to extinguish our passion for riding.
Most of the horses, as I realise now, must have been the rejects from the bizarre world of
Soviet Sport. They tended to fall into two categories: the shrewd stubborn asses whose sole
aim in life was to avoid moving at all and the lunatic types who behaved like they had colics.
Riding hats were unheard of - the only people who wore them were the children of foreign
diplomats who came for private lessons. Accidents were common, falling off being mildly
preferable to standing at X for the duration of the lesson in full view of the spectating public.
Bucking and rearing were generally agreed to be the least scary vices, followed by kicking
and biting in the stables, with the dreaded bolting topping the list. When a horse bolted, Rosa
Georgievna would stop the ride and we would all sit on our horses motionless, holding our
breath and watching one crazed animal dart across the arena at sharp angles, first with its rider
on and then without. I can still remember the eerie silence that filled the vast glass-encased
space on these occasions.
The Union of Writers’ Sanatorium where I spent summers with my grandmother was situated
some two hundred miles outside Moscow. The once rural region was increasingly becoming a
holiday spot but in the few surrounding villages peasant farmers still kept cart horses. Faced
with a prospect of no riding lessons until October, I thought it no great loss to try my luck with
the farmers. I noticed that one old man regularly went past the Sanatorium grounds in his cart,
so I waited at the gate and asked if he would let me ride. He probably thought it odd and
unbecoming that a female child with an urban accent should be chatting him up in such a
shameless fashion, so most of the time he just ignored me. It was all the more to my
astonishment when one day he responded to my usual opening line “Uncle Joe, will you let me
ride your horse?” with an offer:
“My broodmare’d walked off with her foal the other day, I’m on my way to get her now. If
you want, you can come along in the cart and ride her on the way back.” It had to be a quick
decision: with no time to change out of my cotton-print shorts, nor to ask to be allowed to go
(and who would have let me ride off in a cart with a strange man anyway?), I forced all
thoughts of dire consequences out of my mind and climbed in. We drove a fair distance
before getting to the place where another farmer had apprehended the errant mare. She was
dappled grey, all skin-and-bones, a sad old nag struggling to feed her offspring. The old man
tied a rope to her headcollar, helped me onto her protruding spine and back we went, at a
weary trot, with the foal behind, along the bumpy country road. He appeared to be taking a
longer route and stopped at a farm to load something into the cart. By then my discomfort had
become so severe that I was able to summon courage and plead for a sack cloth to be laid
across the mare’s back in the absence of a saddle but stopped short of asking to be let back
into the cart. When we finally reached the Sanatorium grounds the sun was beginning to set. I
knew I had missed supper. Numb with pain and fear, I was ready to face the music. The
search was called off and I was taken to the health centre where the doctor subjected me to
rigorous and humiliating questioning before treating my wounds. The next day, as I was
sheepishly walking around the grounds hoping that the story of my escapades wouldn’t get
around, one of the Sanatorium residents, a grand old lady in firs who vaguely knew me as a
girl who came into the main hall to practice the piano every morning, greeted me with a
disarming smile: “Oh, it was a most splendid sight yesterday at sunset, my dear, you on your
grand white horse!”
With the summer over, it was back to school and music lessons, to drawing horses in art
classes and on the inside covers of textbooks, and long intervals without riding. I took out a
subscription to Pferd Und Sport - an East German equestrian magazine printed on poor
quality paper with blurred black-and-white photographs which I cut out to decorate my
bedroom. I tried to ask Grandmother who was a native speaker of Yiddish to translate the
articles for me but the convoluted lingo of the Eastern Block sport journalism proved less than
straightforward for her to tackle, and was too much like the stuff of which Pravda newspaper
was made for me to insist. Apart from the episode with the farmer’s horse, my only other act
of recklessness was to lie to Grandmother about going to practice at the music school one day
while instead I escaped to The Manege: I had been off-school, recovering from a flu and the
opportunity of riding on a weekday morning in term-time when, I knew, the riding school
would be empty was too tempting to miss. Unfortunately, Gran decided to phone the music
school to check with my piano teacher if I got there safely.
On one of my recent trips to Moscow I suddenly decided to go and see if the old place was
still there. After struggling to remember the way to the Hippodrome along the streets of
Moscow which have changed beyond recognition in recent years, and having to ask a passer-
by, I eventually found the shortcut to the racecourse, and retraced my steps of 25 years ago
to the glass structure, now covered in grey mould and looking run down. The entrance was
boarded up but I noticed a makeshift sign “The Manege”, pointing towards what looked like a
building-site barracks. I walked up the ramp and found myself in the stables, with not a soul in
sight. A timetable pinned to a notice board announced that lessons were available on
Thursdays only. After wandering around for while, I knocked on one of the doors. A woman
in her thirties came out, looking like she was suffering from a bad hangover, and asked me
wearily what I wanted. I started to explain that I rode here as a child, that I was now living in
England and had just started riding again after all those years... Did she, perhaps, know the
teacher called Rosa Georgievna?
“Rosa Georgievna is dead”.
“Oh dear... I am only in Moscow for a few days to visit my grandmother but could I maybe
come and ride, just for old times’ sake?”
“Yes, that’s alright, you can come on Thursday but make sure you bring your Theory
certificate. Have you attended Theory?”
I swallowed hard: “Yes, I certainly did back then but it’s been over 25 years! I haven’t got
the certificate anymore”.
“Well, you should try to find it. You can’t ride without Theory”.
“Honestly, I don’t think I have it anymore.”
“Well, in that case you will have to attend it again. We only do Theory on Mondays.”
My flight back to England was leaving on Sunday afternoon.
©Black Fox 2007-2008
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