My love is a horse. Part of 1
Moscow warriors of the middle of the XVI century (from Herbertstein, 1557)
It is impossible not to write about war horses while living in the Rostov region. My first childhood memory is a reddish horse, and on it is a smart little boy. And one more memory - winter, cold, we return home from school on foot: we had to walk several kilometers. And then our neighbor Uncle Vanya caught up with us on his sleigh, pulled by a bay horse. And on the way, our good neighbor told us how he fought in the cavalry corps, and how many times he was saved by the speed and endurance of his Budennovsk horse. But how long has it been!
Before Peter the Great, no one intervened in the business of raising new horse breeds for military needs: there were no government decrees issued to this effect. It is known that in the battles with the Swedes it became clear to Peter that it was necessary to redo the existing orders in the military cavalry: despite the military successes, she lacked equipment and war horses.
“If, according to this painting, horses and supplies are not sent to the dragoons, it’s impossible to go on a hike with unarmed people, so that they don’t bring any dishonor and will be deserted for little horses” (i.e., due to the lack of horses, small number of soldiers), field marshal Boris Petrovich Sheremetyev wrote in his report to the tsar.
Due to its mobility, horse regiments inflicted irreparable damage to the enemy. "After giving a brief rest to his cavalry, von Verdun, with the aim of depriving the Narva garrison of forage and provisions, he burnt the whole neighborhood at a distance of 20 versts from Narva and returned to Yamburg," said Nikolai Volynsky, an 200-year chronicler stories military horses, who created the "History of the Life Guards Cuirassier of His Majesty the regiment 1701-1901".
And there were many more glorious victories near Narva, near Poltava, made by cavalry regiments.
But armies needed special horses. And urgently.
There were no stud farms in Russia, and those horses that entered the army did not correspond to the combat reality. After all, the horses were mixed and were bought from anyone: from steppe nomads or from ordinary inhabitants. Then they had to be tamed, forced to "walk" under a military rider.
The treatment and maintenance of such horses was also required to be carried out according to certain rules. As it would be said in our time, the orderlies and horsemen were people who were not particularly revered, who received the lowest salary: according to the military staffing table of 1711, the batman received six rubles a month, and the horse “doctor” - 12 rubles. The same number received private. For comparison: the captain received 100 rubles, the lieutenant - 80 rubles. The price of a dragoon warrior, according to the report card, is defined in 15 rubles 10 altyn.
The sovereign studied the experience of Swedish horse breeders and ordered to create factories all over Russia. Their main goal is to grow a horse breed for the army. By decree of January 16, 1712 was ordered to start a horse factory. For non-fulfillment of the sovereign's decree, the guilty were ordered to be punished with “cruel torture”. This is how the first breeds of military horses appeared: batyug, mezinskaya, blame, which marked the beginning of the military horse breeding industry.
The task of Peter the Great was completed. Russia began to raise military horses that could withstand many kilometers of crossings, fighting that lasted more than one day, fire, ferries, traveling and intelligence services, embarkation and disembarkation of ships (ie, landing). Yes, and it happened. In the middle of September, the Life Guard Cuirassier Regiment of the 1805 carried out a landing on vessels intended for the transportation of the landing corps of Lieutenant General Tolstoy to Swedish Pomerania. During this difficult operation, a storm broke, and one of the ships, the Prince Carl, was wrecked. It is delighted and surprised that the Russian units repeatedly crossed the Elbe and the Vistula rivers and participated in demonstration parade marches in front of the British ministers and the Prussian king.
But, as is often the case, with the advent of new rulers, attitudes toward military horse breeding have changed. With the arrival of the reign of Catherine I began not the best of times. Strict compliance with the laws and regulations on horse breeding was no longer there, and the grandees in charge of the horse breeding industry "repaired many things useful for themselves and harmful for the state."
Another no less great woman empress, Anna Ioannovna, had Biron in her retinue, who had a weakness not only for the ruling person, but also for the horses. And it is not known what he liked more. However, this is not our business. The main thing - Biron seriously engaged in the creation of exemplary military cavalry, and for this he needed exemplary horses. All this led to the heyday of horse breeding: in the year for these needs from the treasury were allocated about 100 000 rubles, which was equal in those times to the annual content of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Funds were allocated simply colossal.
Under the influence of Biron, the Russian cavalry was “sculpted” according to a Western pattern. To meet the new standards, horses were purchased outside of Russia, in German regions: Silesia, Prussia.
A new phrase appeared in the Russian language - horse repair, i.e. purchase of horses for military needs. Procurement was done by specially trained officers from the military layers: they were called repairmen, and their activities were repaired.
However, it soon became clear that buying horses abroad costs enormous funds: in the reign of Anna Ioannovna, the cost of one horse reached 616 rubles 65 cop., And for elite, cuirassier regiments and even more - 710 rubles.
Such expensiveness simply forced to breed the "reiter" horse at home: this name came from the German word reiter - "horseman". The business community was involved for the first time in this case. According to the draft cabinet minister Artemy Petrovich Volynsky, it was necessary "to involve a private enterprise and put the horse breeding to the degree of the cause of the public, and not narrowly state. "
Artemy Petrovich is truly a legendary person who has done so much for military horse breeding that the story about him is worth a separate article. It is noteworthy that both Biron and Artemy Petrovich had a great passion for horses, loved and cared for them, but these two prominent politicians hated each other even to the point of wanting death. This is what happened. Artemy Petrovich became one of the main conspirators against his enemy, but the plot was uncovered. It cost the life of Artemy Petrovich. It's a pity. After all, this man could still do a lot in his noble career.
He loved and admired horses so much that he kept track of their every day life. And based on his many years of observation, he wrote a special twenty-point instruction - “Regulu on horses”, where he describes in detail how to care, what to feed, when to allow the stallion to go to the uterus and what to feed him, and how. d.
According to her reading, you understand how difficult it was to grow war horses: for example: "stallions of four years in the fifth and five years in the sixth should be counted with large horses and give oats to pure stallions as shown above: in August and in September a day by adding two lobes of the chop, and in October the third lobe of the quadruple per day, mixed in half with the chop, and in November, in December and in the Gennar each day give one-fourth of the clean oats, adding two lobes of chopping to it, and which will be suitable for allowances, those in February to prepare for launches and feed as shown above on pripusknyh stallions "- wrote Artemy Petrovich.
Thanks to the efforts of Artemy Petrovich, new plants appeared not only in Russia, but also in the Ukraine and Great Russia: in just one year 10 stud farms were opened. “A considerable amount of money came to equip troops with Reiter horses; until now, such horses were bought in the German territories, and in order to continue to donate money from our state not to carry them abroad, to complete shelves with domestic horses.”
But then came the truly dark days for military plants.
To be continued ...
A selection of chromolithographs based on drawings by the artist Ba is an illustrative material for the book The History of the Life Guards Cuirassier Regiment of His Majesty, written by the same regiment Alexander Amiratovich Tugan-Mirza Baranovsky and published in St. Petersburg in 1872 year. Illustrations of the book "The uniform of the Life Guards Cuirassier regiment of His Majesty", author: Romanovsky A. S.
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