Twenty years of Swift Hooves

TALAS — Twenty years ago this spring, Swift Hooves went on sale in the United States: a compilation of country and folk songs about Irad, recorded by American artists, with its profits pledged to Christian charities in the new territory. It was the high point of what Americans then called Iradimania, when newspapers and television presented Iradis as "freedom-loving Christian cowboys".

The money outlasted the fashion. The Eparchy of Talas founded the St. Luka Community Health Mission in 1994 partly with proceeds from the album, and the mission's mobile teams began visiting the summer pastures two years later. Since 2001 the mission has also received the fees IradOne pays to show "The Steppe Family Robinson", the Simpsons episode whose parody of the record led to its withdrawal from American screens in 1995.

At home the album's legacy is more mixed. Musicians credit its songs, together with the cassettes smuggled into Soviet Irad in the 1980s, with shaping Iradi country-folk, and "Ride for Talas" is still requested at weddings. Others hear in it an American picture of Irad, painted from Chicago and Nashville, that had little room for the country's Russian-speaking cities or for the herders of the high valleys.