It was over three years ago that I found a web site dedicated to hunting with borzoi in Russia. I e-mailed the site owner and that began an e-mail friendship which led to an exchange of borzoi hunting videos, and eventually to an invitation to visit Russia and see borzoi in their native land. The first Perm Sighthound Conference was planned. The invitation from my Russian friend Alexander Lyutin came in April, and we began the paper work on both sides of the world. There was the filing of the personal invitation with OVIR, which is required to visit Russia; followed by the expedited shipping of the required official invitation form necessary to obtain a Russian visa; followed by the expedited acquisition of my birth certificate which is required to obtain a US passport (this was not so easy, as I was born in England and the seal required in the US for a passport was unobtainable from England); the expedited application for the passport itself; followed by the expedited overnight application to the Russian Consulate for the visa itself; and, finally, the airline tickets. Everywhere it says “expedited”, read, “triple the normal cost”. It was a rush to get everything done by the end of July, and the date of my flight was delayed almost to the very day of the scheduled Sighthound Conference; but on July 22nd, I was on the plane to Moscow.
       First there was the 2 hour drive from Moscow, Idaho to the Spokane, WA airport; then the brief 1 hour flight to Seattle WA, followed by a 2 hour layover; and then the 11 hour flight over the North Pole to the “other” Moscow.  I then had a 12-hour wait in Moscow for the flight to Perm. I arrived in Perm at 5:10 AM, 28 hours after starting out, and I was met by Alexander and his friend Antone.  Antone had a car and was our driver; not everyone in Russia has a car. We were immediately off to the small village of Kalinino, about 100 kilometers from Perm, where the Hunt Club borzoi show was to take place that very day. Perm is a city of about 1 million in the Ural Mountains. It was a closed city under the USSR because of factories located there.
       Kalinino is a rural weekend getaway place for the people living in industrial Perm. We arrived at the house where we were to stay, which was set up for visitors. There were rooms upstairs for sleeping and a pleasant porch for sitting, talking and eating. I was fed almost as soon as I arrived, and I think I ate 6 times that day. All the food was very good, with fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, bread, soups, and of course, vodka. It was a whirlwind day as, still without having slept, I met everyone. Many spoke some English, and a couple of people who spoke very good English translated for me.
       Almost as soon as I arrived the people started to talk about borzoi, wanting to know about the borzoi in the US. Because of the conference and Hunt Club borzoi show, many of the people were borzoi people, though there were also hunters with other sighthound breeds. The morning was spent just getting to know people and eating and resting. Some young college women who were collecting and preserving Russian folk songs came and sang these traditional Russian songs. Their voices had an impressive resonance and the songs were strong and moving. The people were very friendly, and they were all concerned that I was having a good time.

        We had the dog show later in the day, after waiting for some of the participants to arrive; people commonly travel long distances by train with their dogs because of lack of cars. The show was held under the Hunt Club rules, in contrast to FCI or US rules. It was interesting to see an example of how the Hunt Club shows are conducted. In this case there were two judges, who discussed each exhibit at length. The concentration is on the structure of the dog, and not on the person or the presentation.  The judge spends much more time on each dog than the judges in the US do. Each dog is measured to assess proportions. The dogs are walked and observed for an extended period. Then each entrant receives a rating and a written critique detailing strengths and weaknesses as perceived by the judges.
        At the end of the day it was time for the traditional Russian steam bath, called the banya. The banyas are located in small sheds or buildings near the houses. They are a mostly dry bath in which a water and beer mixture is poured over hot rocks, creating steam. The banya was very warm and relaxing. After heating up for a while, we would run out to the stream and pour cold water over ourselves to cool down, then go back into the banya again. In the banya there was a bundle of small birch branches with the leaves on. These can be used to beat yourself with, to stimulate blood flow; you can also have a friend wield the branches for you. After the banya it was off to bed for the first time in 3 days.

                                                              The Banya

        The next day was the sighthound conference. My friend Alexander gave a presentation on a proposal to have regional champions, and there was a presentation on starting a state breeding program in the Nizhni Novgorod area of Russia. I presented two papers at the conference, one by myself and one by my wife Yvonne. My presentation was on open field coursing in America. The Russians are very interested in how we practice hunting here, and they ask many questions about our rules, rabbits, judging, and terrain. Then I presented Yvonne’s paper, which was on the Borzoi Club of America logo and how it has changed over time, from an old logo which portrayed working sighthound qualities, to the more recent logo which portrays a generic show dog lacking particular sighthound qualities. The Russians were most interested in this presentation and the ensuing discussion of the borzoi structure. They were very interested in discussing what makes a good functional borzoi, and they were very dismayed by the fact that many Americans had no interest in the functionality of the breed or in hunting with sighthounds.
        That evening, as it was getting dark, Alexander and I took a walk around the village and we talked about borzoi. We got onto the subject of the “brossok”. The brossok is the last minute burst of speed that a borzoi makes just as it reaches the game. The old Russians breeders felt that the brossok was specific to the Borzoi breed, and they described it as “a bullet leaving the gun”. Alexander felt that he had only seen this a few times in his life, and that if a Borzoi could not exhibit brossok, maybe they were not, truly, a Borzoi. This was one of the differences that I saw in Russia from the American show fancier. The Russians were interested in the abilities of the dogs, unseen qualities that make the breed different from other breeds. A dog is defined by what it does, rather than entirely by how it looks. This is actually similar to how sled dog racers define whether a dog is an Alaskan or not; by how it does, not by how it looks. Many of the show people in America are only concerned with the external features of the dog and do not consider anything else to be important. After our walk it was back to the house, the banya, and then to bed.

        I spent the next few days sightseeing around Perm. We took a drive north through the Urals to see some of the churches and the countryside. We had a nice visit with Yura, another borzoi judge, or “expert” as judges are called in Russia. Then we were invited to come and see the largest borzoi kennel in Siberia, so on Friday Alexander and I took a train to the city of Omsk, in Siberia. It was a 20-hour train ride, through the Urals and part of Siberia. It was a nice relaxing train ride, and Alexander and I talked about borzoi again. One point was of great interest me, because of the stretching out of the rear legs so commonly seen in the show ring in America. In the Russian Hunt Club rules of judging, if a line is dropped from the point of the hip to the ground, the hind foot should be from 5 to 8 cm behind that line and no further. This is a distance of about 2 to 3 ¼ inches. In the American show ring, we are seeing a trend to stretch the hind foot farther and farther back, with the rear assembly dropping so the hip falls significantly below the level of the whithers. This produces a large angle at the stifle as the rear sags down, similar to that seen in the show German Shepherd Dog. This is not the traditional rear in the sighthounds, which have historically had long rear bones with relatively open angles and hips held at approximately the same level as the whithers. It would help to preserve the original long-boned, open-angled borzoi rear, to have some statement about this in the American standard.
        We spent the night on the train sharing a compartment with two women and a girl. I think they were mother, daughter, and grand daughter. They were very nice people, their stop came in the middle of the night and as they were leaving I was awakened by one of them very gently covering me with a blanket.

         We were met at the station in Omsk by Lena, who hunts with her two adult borzoi and is a frequent visitor at the kennel we were going to visit, and two young men who gave us a quick tour of Omsk. Omsk is a city of about one million that was founded in 1716. After the tour we went out to Grisha’s vast farm, which is located about 100 kilometers from Omsk and near the border with Kazakhstan. Grisha has a beautiful kennel, the largest in Siberia. There are large fenced areas for puppies along with smaller areas for adults and for mothers with puppies. He has a large enclosure in which he raises hares to train the young dogs on. There is a straight racing set up with boxes, and he even has a wolf for training purposes. Grisha’s dream is to build a Borzoi hunt like the hunts of old Russia. He raises horses and fox hounds to be used in the hunt. His land stretches as far as the eye can see and beyond, even in flat Siberia. He plans to fence in an area, approximately 10 miles by 10 miles, to keep in game for the borzoi hunts. He has stopped hunting of hares with guns on his land, in efforts to increase the wild hare population.

                                          Grisha and Lana and the dogs.

       The first night at Grisha’s we went out on a hunt, driving across the fields looking for eyes reflecting in the headlights of the van. All they caught that night was a rodent that looked like a large Kangaroo rat. After the hunt it was off to the banya; there was no stream near the bath this time, so to cool off there was a large tub of cold water that you could dump on yourself.
        The next day was spent looking at the dogs and walking around the area a little. Siberia is very beautiful, very flat with large grassy fields and islands of birch trees. And very large; endless open space as far as you can see. That night we went on another hunt, for Corsak fox, a small steppe fox. We found three for the dogs to chase and it was a fun time bouncing across the fields trying to keep the fox in the headlights so the dogs could see. The dogs caught 3 Corsaks that night; then we were off to the banya again. This time after cooling off with the cold water we walked out into the dark and stood there for awhile; it was raining. So there I was, this middle aged guy from Idaho, standing naked in the rain in Siberia, all because I e-mailed a guy in Russia about his web site, and because of our mutual interest in functional borzoi; there I was.
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                                      Hare house.                                                                                    Dog food stove.

       The next day in Omsk was a borzoi day. They held several straight races for me to video. There was a starting box very similar to what you would see in America, but in some of the slots they would put two dogs instead of one.  They would also hand slip a dog or two, so that there were 7 or 8 dogs running at one time. A hand-cranked lure with a fox skin over a plastic milk jug was used, and the dogs would run between two and three hundred yards. There was no one at the end of the run to catch up the dogs and they would all run back to the starting box almost as fast as they ran out on the lure. After the racing they paraded the dogs around the field so that I could get a better look at then. The whole kennel is set up with performance in mind; Grisha is really trying to return the Russian borzoi to what it was 100 years ago, based on hunting.

       After three days in Omsk we left for Saint Petersburg. This time we flew. After landing we caught a bus into town and then took the underground to Alexander’s brother’s flat, where we would stay while in Saint Petersburg. We did some sightseeing around the town the first day and then on the second day we went out to the Peterhof palace. This is a very beautiful palace that has been mostly restored. It is surrounded by a large acreage filled with fountains, all created to work by water pressure because there were no electrical pumps at that time.
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       This was also the site of the Tsar’s hunt from the late 1700’s until 1856, when it was moved to Gatchina. The next day we visited Gatchina, which had been the home of the Tsar’s hunt from 1856 until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Some of the local borzoi hunters took us to Gatchina. The old huntsmen’s houses and the houses the borzoi lived in are still standing there. There were 4 borzoi to one huntsman. The borzoi lived in buildings just across a small dirt street from the huntsmen’s houses, which were about 50 feet away; each huntsman’s house was directly across the small street from the house for the borzoi they were in charge of. It was very interesting to see this; I could just imagine how the dogs were kept and I could almost feel the presence of the hunters and hounds of old. The huntsmen’s houses are still being lived in, but the Borzoi houses are either not being used, or are being used as storage buildings.  We then walked a little ways down the road to a Russian Orthodox Church, sitting like a cut jewel in the woods, with its blue domes visible from a distance. This church was the church of the huntsmen, and has been mostly restored. The huntsmen would come on horse back with the borzoi to the church before the hunts. They would leave the dogs and horses outside, go in for services, and then leave on the hunt. It was very moving for me to see this place, were the borzoi of the Tsars lived and walked over one hundred years ago.

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                    Borzoi House.                                                                  Huntsman's house.

       After visiting the church, we drove down the road to the Gatchina palace. This palace is not completely restored yet. We toured the inside of the palace where they had displays of guns and paintings of hunting scenes; I saw only one painting with borzoi but there were a couple with greyhounds. We then walked around the grounds. They also are not restored, but I think they are very similar to how they would have been when the Tsars lived there. After all, a hundred years ago they did not have lawn mowers. There is a lake on the grounds, and beautiful wooded areas.
   The next day in Saint Petersburg was a borzoi day; we were picked up and driven a short ways out of town, to a field where the hunters go to train their young Borzoi on hares. We set up for a barbeque, which is common in Russian outdoor get-togethers, and more and more people started showing up with their borzoi. It was a nice day of people, borzoi, food and drink. Did I mention that they drink vodka in Russia? It was a great way to see some of the hunting borzoi of Saint Petersburg, and a wonderful way to meet people whose passion is to allow their borzoi to exercise their passion, by taking them hunting.
        After a very nice day we were off to the train station for an overnight train trip to Moscow.  Moscow has an official population of about 14 million, but there is also an unofficial population of migrant or illegal workers, and the real population is estimated at being closer to a mind-boggling 24 million. We spent 3 days in Moscow, a mixture of sightseeing and visiting hunters and their borzoi at their homes. We visited borzoi hunters and their dogs in their flats and houses and we made a short trip out of town to see even more borzoi. On my last day in Moscow we had another barbeque at the home of a borzoi breeder.

        I learned a lot about borzoi in their homeland from my trip to Russia. I also learned a lot about the Russian borzoi people; in many ways they are like sighthound hunters in this country. They are very interested in the running abilities of their dogs and in keeping their native breed true to what it was in the days of the Tsars. I was impressed with their dedication to the breed; many of them kept 3 or 4 borzoi in small flats, in the middle of very large cities. There are very few large kennels such as are common in the US.
        With the functional borzoi losing ground to a more generic show variety in America and elsewhere, I was glad to see that in their native country, there are still a large number of people dedicated to preserving the hunting function and thereby the original form of the breed. Russia may be the last country to hold on to the borzoi as it was, through the popularity and importance given to hunting there. I had a wonderful time in Russia. The people and their hospitality were great; I was there for three weeks and I never spent a night in a hotel. I was very well cared for and everywhere I went, everyone fed me and made sure I was comfortable. The hunting borzoi is alive and well in Russia, and I hope it stays that way because it is losing ground everywhere else in the world.
         I would like to thank all the people in Russia that made my trip so enjoyable and especially my friend Alexander Lyutin. Without him the trip would not have been possible.

                                     Alexander and Me in Red  Square.

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