The first Ukranian Star
by Lisa Harkema
The first World War took an especially heavy toll on Ukraine as well as the Russian Empire as almost all horses perished. One US import survived, however, and after the war gave birth to one of a good trotters who turned out to be one of the best stallions ever seen in Eastern Europe. While he was very good on the tracks, as a stallion Gildeets dominated Soviet trotting for many years.
Note on spelling: Because of the challenges involved in translating between the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets other spellings of the name exist.
In the spring of 1919 Europe was trying to recover from World War I. In the Russian Empire, things were bad. Even before WWI the empire had numerous internal problems which were exasperated by the war. This culminated with the revolutions in 1917 and civil war going until 1923. Food shortages were everywhere, and many horses were slaughtered. In 1918 Lenin’s government nationalized industry, including farms. Horses were worked very hard, and many trotters succumbed to this. Numbers show a 95 % decline in thoroughbred stock in the country for the seven-year-period starting in 1914. It seems to have been better for the Orlovs and standardbred trotters, but many were lost in this period, too. One who, though barely, did survive the WWI was Gay Bingen, an American import born 1903. In 1919 his son Gildeets was born.
Gildeets had a heavily US-influenced pedigree. His damsire was the US-born Passe Rose, a 2:14.2 (1.23,5) trotting son of Patron, whose paternal line traced back to Mambrino Chief. There is still plenty of Hambletonian in this pedigree with his sons Strathmore as damsire and Volunteer as damdamsire. Gildeets was bred by the Natalevskom farm roughly 30 kilometers west of Kharkov in Ukraine and acquired by the Dubrovsky farm, roughly midway between Kyiv and Kharkov in the Poltava region in Ukraine.