Turkmen horsemen arriving in Moscow, 1935, following the Ashgabat–Moscow ride. Image from Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, Krasnogorsk.
Eighty-four days, 4,300 kilometres, and the Golden Horses of Turkmenistan: the story of the 1935 Ashgabat-to-Moscow endurance ride, told through the riders’ own diaries, Soviet newspaper dispatches, and the archives of a vanished empire.
On the morning of May 30, 1935, twenty-eight riders gathered in the streets of Ashgabat, the sun-blasted capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. They wore bright national khalats and shaggy papakhas, and they sat astride some of the most extraordinary horses the world has ever produced: Akhal-Tekes. These lean, golden-coated, ancient desert horses were descendants of those who carried Scythian warriors and the raiding parties of the Silk Road for three thousand years, and are believed by some historians to have been ridden by Alexander the Great himself into battle. The horses’ metallic coats shimmered in the morning light like living bronze.
They were about to attempt something no one had ever done. They would ride their horses 4,300 kilometres, roughly 2,700 miles, from the southern edge of the USSR to its capital’s Red Square in Moscow, crossing the most punishing terrain in the Soviet Union: the furnace of the Karakum Desert, the desolate cliffs of the Ustyurt Plateau, the waterless Volga steppe between the Volga and Ural rivers, and finally the dense forests of central Russia. They would do it in the dead heat of summer and they would do it to save their horses from extinction.
‘Turkmen riders on horseback in a sandstorm’, 1939. Painting by Aleksey Komarov.
The Akhal-Teke breed was in mortal danger. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime had ordered valuable breeding stock sent to slaughter for meat, a decree the Turkmen refused to obey in general and sometimes releasing their horses into the desert rather than comply. At one point, only 1,250 Akhal-Tekes remained alive. Soviet breeding authorities had also been crossing the Akhal-Teke with English Thoroughbreds, producing half-breeds called Anglo-Tekes in an effort to create a faster racehorse. The purebred’s future hung by a thread.
The ride was a gamble – a desperate, audacious petition to the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. If the purebred Akhal-Tekes could prove their superiority over the Anglo-Teke crossbreeds in the most brutal endurance test imaginable, perhaps Stalin would let the breed live.
THE RIDERS: COLLECTIVE FARMERS, NOT CAVALRYMEN
There were no professional riders or cavalrymen in the saddles. In a detail that says everything about the ride’s character, the twenty-eight men were collective farm workers, kolkhozniki, chosen as much for their revolutionary credentials as their horsemanship. The youngest was nineteen-year-old Kurban Ovez Geldy and the eldest was fifty-five-year-old Gabysh Mamysh, the party organiser of the expedition. The most experienced was the legendary desert guide Nepes Karakhan, who had navigated the Karakum for twenty-five years without a compass, led geological expeditions for the famed Soviet scientists Fersman and Geller, and fought the Basmachi insurgents in the years after the Russian Civil War. Bek Murad Anna Murad, another rider, had also spent years fighting Basmachi bandits on horseback across the same desert they were about to cross.
Preparation was meticulous. Every horse underwent veterinary examination. A scientific team designed individualised feeding rations, measured pulse, respiration, and body temperature before and after each day’s march, and drew blood samples at regular intervals. Knowing that horses would lose enormous quantities of salt through sweat, they added fifty to sixty grams of salt to each animal’s daily feed. The horses were shod with three different types of horseshoes (military, lightened, and traditional Eastern) to determine which performed best under extreme stress. A support team accompanied the column: Dr. V. D. Sokolov, head of the scientific group; N. I. Putilin, a correspondent for the newspaper Turkmenskaya Iskra, who filed dispatches from the trail; and the cinematographer P. A. Pyatkov, whose footage of the crossing would be edited into the documentary film Heroes of Kolkhoz Turkmenistan. What survives of Putilin’s dispatches and the ride commander’s diary, preserved in the yellowed pages of Turkmenskaya Iskra and in the Soviet Central State Archive, provides the most vivid account of what happened next.
The 4,300-kilometre route from Ashgabat to Moscow.
INTO THE KARAKUM: THE DESERT CROSSING
The first leg was the most dangerous. The riders had to cross the Karakum, one of the world’s largest and hottest sand deserts, a stretch of roughly 350 kilometres of waterless, roadless wasteland. Temperatures routinely exceeded 60°C (140°F) at ground level. The official Soviet newspaper Izvestia would later describe this segment in language rarely seen in the normally restrained broadsheet:
Nearly a quarter of their journey, a thousand kilometres, they travelled through uninhabited desert, across sands and rocks, where there are neither roads nor vegetation. And the only person they encountered over those thousand kilometres was a fisherman who had accidentally landed on an uninhabited shore of the Aral Sea.
The ride commander’s diary tells a more intimate story. Within the first few days, the column ran into trouble.
June 4 Road to Darvaza: We set off early in the morning. It is very hot, 60 degrees. There is not enough feed for the horses. The water is of very poor quality. We tried to draw from buried wells, remnants of the civil war, some of which were covered with the bodies of dead animals. The horses refuse to drink this water.
June 7:We set off early in the morning, covering a total of 40 km. The heat does not let the horses or us rest. We have no fresh water; hopefully we will reach a settlement as soon as possible. There was a sandstorm, it was hard to see, hard to breathe. We got off the horses and led them; the horses refused to go through the deep packed sand.
June 8 Darvaza: Today we arrived in Darvaza. The locals gave us a very nice welcome. The water here, however, is bad – sulphur is quarried and the water has a salty taste. The horses refuse to drink it. There’s nothing to do but pour it through their nostrils. It’s terrible to see the horses suffer like this, but we had no choice.
That detail, pouring sulfurous water through a horse’s nostrils because it refused to drink, is the kind of thing that separates an adventure from a myth. The diary is full of such moments: men tearing up wild lucerne by hand to gather enough fodder for the night, hauling 180-pound barrels of water up rocky cliffs on the Ustyurt Plateau, laying down paths of collected saxaul wood over kilometres of soft sand so the horses wouldn’t sink to their knees. The Izvestia account captured the riders’ self-sacrifice in one remarkable passage:
The riders pressed forward without stopping. They laid down saxaul wood over entire kilometres to make a path. They threw their own khalats from their shoulders and covered their horses with them. They gave the last water from their canteens to their four-legged friends.
For three days, the horses crossed the most desolate stretch of the Karakum with virtually no water. The purebred Akhal-Tekes, bred for exactly this kind of suffering across three millennia, handled it with an almost supernatural composure; the Anglo-Teke crossbreeds did not.
‘Horse Run’, 1937. Carpet from the All-Russian Decorative Arts Museum, Moscow.
THE LONG MIDDLE: STEPPE, RAIN, AND COLIC
After surviving the desert, the column turned north through the Ustyurt Plateau and into the vast Volga steppe. The terrain changed utterly. Instead of furnace heat and sand, the riders now faced humidity, heavy rain, and the unfamiliar green dampness of the Russian interior. For horses bred in an arid environment, the adjustment was brutal.
June 29: The march now went on for practically five days without rest; the daily distances covered were around 100 km. It was undoubtedly a risk to the horses, but they completely surprised us with how quickly they were able to recover. Everyone made it through this demanding stage safely; the only health problem was noted in Kir Burnak, who caught a slight cold.
July 6: We are three days away from Aktubinsk. We should be doing better now, although it will be harder for the horses to acclimatise to the humid climate and heavy rain.
July 20 Buzuluk: Today we arrived in Buzuluk. Heavy rain has started, the horses are soaked to the bone. There are no stables in town, so there is no choice but to leave the horses in the rain.
August 8: Two horses have developed a temperature, related to colic. The horses have trouble changing their feed. We decided to give them a rest today. The vet did not sleep a wink all night and kept an eye on the health of both horses.
For eighty-four days, the column pushed on through every climate zone the Soviet Union could throw at them: desert, semi-desert, mountain, steppe, forest-steppe, and deep forest. They averaged roughly fifty kilometres a day, with bursts of one hundred kilometres or more when conditions demanded speed over caution. Through towns and settlements, crowds gathered to stare at the lean, strange horses and their sun-blackened riders. The route Ashgabat to Erbent to Kunya-Urgench to Kungrad to Aktubinsk to Orenburg to Kuybyshev to Penza to Ryazan and finally Moscow became a kind of triumphal procession through the Soviet heartland.
RED SQUARE: AUGUST 22, 1935
The final diary entry is the most stirring.
August 17: We woke up early in the morning, examined the horses, they are all in excellent condition. Moscow is a stone’s throw away. Only 180 km to go.
August 22: Early in the morning we set off in the direction of Lyubertsy. Here we were greeted by a squadron of cavalrymen and five hundred cyclists with flags and banners. We were also escorted to Moscow by a military squadron. A short rally was held on the outskirts of Moscow and then we proceeded to Red Square where we laid flowers at the walls of the Kremlin. All the streets of Moscow are decorated with posters and leaflets in Russian and Turkmen, as well as greenery and flowers. The whole city welcomed us; everyone wanted to see our horses.
The Soviet press erupted. Every major Russian newspaper devoted pages to the story on August 26, 27, and 28. Izvestia called it “unprecedented in world history.” The official government decree awarded all the riders the Order of the Red Star. The People’s Commissar of Defense, Voroshilov, presented each man with a personalised gold watch. The People’s Commissar of Agriculture gave them all bicycles, a charmingly modest gift for men who had just ridden horses across a continent. Thirty-two collective farms in Turkmenistan received state funds to build cultural institutions.
Participants of the Ashgabat–Moscow ride, 1935. Image by Olga Ignatovich.
The next day, on August 23, the riders were received in the Kremlin by Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, and by Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. The Izvestia reporter captured the scene:
In the large, bright assembly hall of the Central Executive Committee, the finest collective farmers of the sunny republic gathered, those whose glory had thundered across the entire country. In bright national khalats, shaggy papakhas, bronze from sunburn, they took their places at the wide table.
“Comrade Stalin very attentively followed all reports about your ride. He spoke with me about it, characterising it as a heroic feat that could only be accomplished by people of our country.” – Kliment Voroshilov, People’s Commissar of Defense, at the Kremlin reception
The government decree concluded with a phrase that became famous in Turkmenistan: “Glory to the fearless horsemen of scorching Turkmenia!”
THE VERDICT: PUREBLOODS WIN
The scientific results were unambiguous. The purebred Akhal-Tekes and Yomut horses (a breed by the Turkmen tribe Yomut for extreme endurance) arrived at the finish in excellent condition. The Anglo-Teke crossbreeds- stallions Dor-Depel and Burnok were in visibly poor shape. As one official report put it: the purebreds Arab, Dorkush, Alsakar, Titanik, and Al-Kush had “freely covered up to 4,000 kilometres, while the half-bred stallions had greatly deteriorated.”
The implications were immediate. The studbook authorities ruled that all crossbred horses born after 1936 would no longer be considered purebred Akhal-Tekes. The crossbreeding program was effectively dead. Three thousand years of nomadic selective breeding had proven more durable than modern genetics; the Akhal-Teke would survive.
“Obstinate nature strained all its evil ingenuity, devising ever new difficult obstacles in their path. It left them without water for long periods. Their horses sank knee-deep in the sand. But the riders pressed forward without stopping.” – Izvestia, August 1935
The purebred Akhal-Tekes and Yomut horses arrived at the finish in excellent condition. Image by Olga Ignatovich
A LOVE STORY IN THE DESERT
No adventure worth its salt is without a love story, and the 1935 ride has a beauty. Among the horses were the grey stallion Ak Sakal and the mare Kyr Bajtal. Somewhere along the brutal 4,300-kilometer route, through sandstorms, sulfurous water, colic, and exhaustion, the two horses conceived a foal. The colt, born afterward, was named “518 Moscow” and went on to become a successful racehorse, the sole continuation of the Ak Sakal bloodline. Even the hardships of the journey, the studbook records note with quiet amusement, could not prevent love.
AFTERLIVES: FROM RED SQUARE TO THE OLYMPICS
The stallion who emerged from the ride with the most spectacular future was number 26: Arab, a grey purebred Akhal-Teke born in 1930. After arriving in Moscow in excellent condition, Arab was presented as a gift to Stalin himself. He went on to become a champion in eventing and show jumping, setting the Soviet national record in show jumping with a clearance of 2.19 metres, at the age of sixteen. He won the Cup of the Soviet Union in 1949. But Arab’s greatest legacy was his son. The black stallion Absent (sometimes transliterated as Absinthe), born from Arab’s line, became arguably the most famous Akhal-Teke who ever lived. Ridden by Sergei Filatov, Absent won the Olympic gold medal in individual dressage at the 1960 Rome Games, the first equestrian gold for the Soviet Union. He went on to win individual and team bronze in Tokyo in 1964, and Soviet team silver in Mexico City in 1968, under Ivan Kalita. Four Olympic medals across spanning three consecutive Olympic Games, all descending from a horse who had crossed a desert without water in 1935.
Ridden by Sergei Filatov, the Akhal-Teke stallion Absent won the Olympic gold medal in individual dressage at the 1960 Rome Games, the first equestrian gold for the Soviet Union. Image by Split Seconds/Alamy Stock Photos.
THE HOMECOMING
The riders did not ride back. The return journey would have been physically impossible, arriving no earlier than December, through autumn rain, mud, and then snow. They went home by train. On September 13, 1935, Izvestia reported on the scene:
The heroic horsemen, participants in the ride Ashgabat–Moscow, yesterday arrived by train at the borders of Turkmenia. Several hundred Turkmen riders galloped out to meet them. From above, a squadron of ‘Dynamo’ airplanes welcomed them. A great crowd of collective farmers showered the heroes with flowers. September 13 – the horsemen arrived in Ashgabat. This day was declared a national Turkmen holiday.
In 1937, master weavers at the Ashgabat carpet factory produced a one-of-a-kind carpet called The Horse Ride, depicting the events of the 1935 crossing. It was exhibited publicly only once, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, before disappearing into a Moscow museum for nearly eighty years; Russian audiences did not see it until a 2014 exhibition.
The following year, inspired by the men’s triumph, twelve young women from the Lebap region of Turkmenistan rode 587 kilometres from Turkmenabat to Ashgabat, two hundred of those kilometres through the shifting sands of the Karakum. The Turkmen “Amazons,” as the press called them, arrived in the capital to cheering crowds at the railway square.
THE GOLDEN HORSES ENDURE
Today, roughly 6,600 Akhal-Tekes survive worldwide. In 2023, UNESCO inscribed the art of Akhal-Teke horse breeding and decoration on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The breed’s metallic coat still shimmers like something from a myth. They still run, lean and tireless, through the oases at the foot of the Kopet Dag mountains – the same country, the same hot sand, the same ancient wind. And in the archives of a Moscow museum, a carpet woven in 1937 shows twenty-eight riders crossing a desert on golden horses, heading north toward a distant capital, carrying the fate of a breed on their backs.
About the author: Christopher Wizda, a member of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies), is an international development and education specialist with over a decade of experience across Eurasia, including Turkmenistan, Mongolia, and Russia. He has led programmes for NGOs, UN agencies, and government-adjacent organisations, focusing on capacity building, community development, and strategic planning. Fluent in Russian and experienced in Mongolian and Turkic languages, he leverages regional expertise and cross-cultural insight to advance sustainable development and institutional strengthening. He is currently conducting specialised research on Turkmenistan and Turkmen culture. EQ
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