WHEEL OF FORTUNE : Even Soviet Horse Race Bettors Are Changing With Times

Fifteen minutes up the road from the Kremlin, a couple of retired Red Army colonels lean against the rail and watch the ponies lumber to the finish.

“A nag,” says the one with a dozen medals and a spectacular handlebar moustache.

“Next time I put my money on a horse that doesn’t limp,” says the Hero of Socialist Labor. They turn away in disgust, letting a stack of betting slips flutter from their hands. If they could buy a beer, they’d buy six, but they can’t, so they smoke and bet again.

Three afternoons a week, the Moscow Hippodrome, the best-known racetrack in the empire, is a place to while away a few hours, dump some rubles and have a nosh in the sun. By world standards, the horses are plodders, if well-meaning, and the infield has the well-trimmed look of a gothic heath. It hardly matters. Ever since the czars, Muscovites have come here all year round -- even in the dead of winter -- to watch troika races.

Perestroika, that ubiquitous word that stands for every change imaginable in this country, is even promising to shake up Soviet racetracks. The Hippodrome’s director, Zalayev Kazbeyek, just returned from his first trip to the United States and Canada. He may have visited the usual tourist sites, but he says he didn’t really notice. “I was paying attention most when we went to Yonkers, Belmont, Churchill Downs. God knows how many tracks I went to,” he said.

One of the most impressive parts of his trip was the off-track betting systems he saw. “We’re going to set up something like that here, I’ve got no doubts about it,” he said. “I don’t think this country is especially known for its betting at the track, but there’s nothing anti-socialist or anti-Soviet. It’s good, creative fun. It’s healthy, and why shouldn’t everyone have a chance to lay down a few rubles on a horse?”

The current betting system at the Hippodrome is Byzantine, about as user-friendly as your average Moscow grocery store. The writers of the daily racing form seem to feel they are exceeding the limits of generosity by telling their readers the color of the horse and the weight of the jockey. Nearly everything else is left to the imagination.

The track entitles itself to a 25 percent take. The tote board is broken -- awaiting help from a Swedish firm. There are no announced odds, and the payoffs are miserly. The most common bets are quinellas and daily doubles, and even they pay off low. Place and show bets do not even exist.

For those who do not trust the betting windows (and the shifty fellows who operate the books behind them), there are bookies ( bukmakeri) roaming the stands who do business out of pocket. “Those guys are crooks too, but at least I can see their faces,” said Anatoli, a bulldozer operator who has been coming here every Sunday for years, but asked that his last name not be used lest his wife be disabused of the notion that he has been spending his free time at the Lenin Library.

Kazbeyek said he is hoping he will be able to open off-track betting storefronts soon in Moscow, “comfortable joints” where customers will be able to lay down their money and then watch the race on television monitors.

“No reason we shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said, as a half-dozen trotters prance by. “I’ve been getting no opposition from the government. Besides we’re considered an independent operation now. We’re making 6 million rubles a year.”

Racing in the Soviet Union has been interrupted only twice: once in the months following the 1917 revolution and then again in 1941-42 when the Nazis held Leningrad and other cities under siege. The big race of the year is the Soviet Derby on the second Sunday in July, and the winners form the pantheon of racing here: Red Terror (1924), Decembrist (1975) and Harold (1972).

“Our great legend, of course, is Aniline,” said Vasili Melnikov, a 30-year-old jockey whose choice of racing silks is brown. Aniline won the 1964 Soviet Derby, and then went abroad for races in Germany, France and the United States. He lost by a nose in the Washington, D.C., International at Laurel, and did better elsewhere. “That was our greatest ever,” said one old-timer wearing a beat-up boater.

The Soviet Union’s version of “horse country” is the Krasnodar region of the southern U.S.S.R., as well as areas in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. The blood lines here are weak, and every so often various collective and state farms pool together their foreign hard currency and travel to the west for a helpful stud.

This year a Moscow farm bought Fairway Future, a Lexington, Ky., 9 year old for $350,000. He is expected to begin work here in a month. No doubt he will be exhausted by winter. Demand for his company will be high.

Throughout the Soviet period, the race horses have been owned by government-run enterprises, mainly collective farms that specialize in horseflesh. Kazbeyek is hoping he’ll be allowed soon to jack up the prize money from around 500 rubles a race to 10 or 100 times that in order to generate better horse breeding and eventually an entrance onto the great tracks of the world.

“One thing we don’t have to worry about is willing bettors,” he said on an afternoon when about 8,000 people (maybe 10 of them women) have shown up for the day’s 17 races.

The Hippodrome is a friendly old barn of a place. The architecture is vintage Mussolini, but the place still feels like a gigantic park bench, with thousands of old guys kibbitzing away the afternoon, studying the racing form, taking a nip from battered hip flasks, kibbitzing some more. The racing -- both harness and flats -- isn’t the point really. It’s not as if anyone could buy much with the money they’re throwing away either.

“I live in a two-room apartment with four people,” said the Hero of Socialist Labor. “It’s just nice to hear some different sounds once in a while. Even if I am losing a fortune.”