Cultural Convergence: The Equine Connection between Muscovy and Europe

Abstract

Is Russia Europe? The question divided the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, and has returned to haunt the post-1991 society of the New Russians. Westerners who visited the Muscovite Russian state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries described a fascinating but alien place. By the late eighteenth century, however, Russian aristocrats living in the empire shaped by Peter the Great (1682–1725) and Catherine the Great (1762–96) inhabited a world increasingly like that of their European counterparts. Muscovite “horse culture” both contributed to this process of convergence and reflected its progress.