In 1768, near the Execution Ground, near the pillory stood the landowner Daria Saltykova - the famous Saltychikha, who tortured at least 138 of her serfs to death. For a woman who is not a ruler, this is a kind of record, the largest number of victims in history ...
While the clerk read from the sheet the crimes she had committed, Saltychikha stood with her head uncovered, and a plaque with the inscription "Tormentor and Murderer" hung on her chest. After that, she was sent to eternal imprisonment in the Ivanovo Monastery.
Daria Nikolaeva Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha (1730-1801), is a Russian landowner who went down in history as the most sophisticated sadist and murderer of more than a hundred serfs subject to her. She was born in March 1730 into a family that belonged to the pillar Moscow nobility; relatives of Darya Nikolaevna's parents were the Davydovs, Musins-Pushkins, Stroganovs, Tolstoys and other eminent nobles. Aunt Saltykova was married to Lieutenant General Ivan Bibikov, and her older sister was married to Lieutenant General Afanasy Zhukov.
Marriage
Saltychikha's maiden name was Ivanova. She was the daughter of a nobleman who was related to the Davydovs, the Musin-Pushkins, the Stroganovs and the Tolstoys. She married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov. They had two sons who were enrolled in the Guards regiments.
Surprisingly, she was still a flourishing and, moreover, a very pious woman. Daria herself married Gleb Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, but in 1756 she was widowed. Her mother and grandmother lived in a nunnery, so Darya Nikolaevna became the sole owner of a large fortune. The 26-year-old widow was left with two sons, enrolled in military service in the capital's guards regiments. Almost every year, Daria Saltykova took a trip on a pilgrimage to some Orthodox shrine. Sometimes she drove quite far, visited, for example, the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra; during such trips, Saltykova generously donated "to the Church" and distributed alms.
crimes
At twenty-six, Saltychikha became a widow and received full possession of about six hundred peasants on estates located in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces. In seven years, she killed more than a quarter of her wards - 139 people, most of them women and girls! Most of the murders were carried out in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow.
The main reason for the punishment was dishonesty in mopping or laundry. The punishment began with the fact that she struck the guilty peasant woman with blows with an object that fell under her arm. The offender was then flogged by grooms and haiduks, sometimes to death. Saltychikha could douse the victim with boiling water or singe her hair on her head. Victims were starved and tied naked in the cold.
In one episode, Saltychikha also got a nobleman. Land surveyor Nikolai Tyutchev - the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev - was in a love relationship with her for a long time, but decided to marry another, for which Saltychikha almost killed him along with his wife.
Complaint to the Empress
The initial complaints of the peasants only led to the punishment of the complainants, since Saltychikha had an influential relationship and she managed to bribe officials with bribes. But still, two peasants, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, in 1762 managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne.
At the beginning of the summer of 1762, two fugitive serfs appeared in St. Petersburg - Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov - who set themselves an almost impossible goal: they set out to bring a complaint to the Empress Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna against their mistress, a large landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova. The fugitives had almost no chance of success: firstly, they were in an illegal position and could not verify their identity with passports; secondly, the Sovereign Empress, according to the rules of the then office work, considered documents submitted only by the ranks of the highest four levels of the Table of Ranks (that is, not lower than the Privy Councillor). Before the era of Emperor Paul the First, who fixed a special box on the wall of the Winter Palace for denunciations of "all persons, without distinction of rank", there were still almost four decades; and this meant that a simple person could not be heard by the Power, which did not honor him with audiences and did not accept his petitions. You can say this: the Higher Power simply did not notice their slaves.
However, Ilyin and Martynov had no way back. They could only appeal to the highest Authority in the Empire and move only forward in an attempt to realize their plans. The way back meant certain death for both. Surprisingly, both were able to successfully complete an almost hopeless enterprise.
If the fugitives acted according to the law and tried to file a complaint against their mistress at the place of residence, they would certainly have expected the saddest end. Such attempts have already been made by their predecessors, and they all ended for the daredevils in a very sad (and sometimes downright tragic) way. Therefore, Ilyin and Martynov preferred a long and at first glance illogical path: at the end of April 1762, they fled from the Moscow house of their mistress, but did not move south, to the free Don steppes, but in the exact opposite direction, to the capital of the Empire. With all sorts of hardships and vicissitudes, the unpassported serfs reached St. Petersburg and hid there.
The fugitives were looking for approaches to the Winter Palace, more precisely, for such a person through whom they could convey a complaint to the Empress. It is not known how exactly such a person was found, it is not known at all who he was; most likely, not without a bribe. Be that as it may, in the first half of June, Catherine II received a "written assault" (as statements were called in those days) of Ilyin and Martynov.
Catherine II
In it, the serfs reported the following:
- They are known for their mistress Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova "deadly and not unimportant criminal cases" (as in the original);
- Daria Saltykova "from 1756 the soul with a hundred (...) her, the landowner, was destroyed";
- The authors asked the Empress of all serfs Saltykova "to protect from mortal destruction and merciless inhuman torment";
- Emphasizing the large number of people tortured by Darya Saltykova, the informers stated that only one of them, Yermolai Ilyin, had the landowner successively killed three wives, each of whom she tortured with her own hands;
- For themselves, the authors asked "not to give them, informers, and others into the possession of the landowner."
Lawlessness of the peasants
It should be noted that, in fact, the murders of peasants by landowners were very frequent; during the period under review, the Senate considered several dozen cases with one or more serf victims.
And how many cases did not reach the court, especially the Senate? However, before the Saltychikha case, even the Senate most often justified the landowners, especially if the victim did not die immediately after punishment, but after a while.
For example, a certain wife of Unterschichtmeister Gordeev, "having beaten her girl, drove her barefoot through the frost, so that she almost froze, and then kept her in a cold hallway, from which she died. However, due to Gordeeva's denial that this stay in the cold happened on her orders, the Senate acquitted her.
Even during the consideration of the case of Saltychikha, her serf, who contributed to the disclosure of atrocities, the Senate was sentenced to the whip "for false denunciation" in view of the fact that he incorrectly named the name of one of the victims tortured by her.
But the Saltykova case became a landmark case that marked a new era of legality, where a high position did not automatically give the right to excesses. All were to be equal before the law.
The gentry of the Smolensk gentry Vysotsky, who killed the wife of his peasant, was, however, sentenced to a whip and exile to Nerchinsk. Having canceled the whip, Catherine 2 supplemented this punishment with some shameful penalties. The widow Maryina, who, together with her young son, found a serf, was sentenced to confinement in a monastery, and the empress also increased the punishment.
Borzenkov, who had flogged two serf girls to death, was sentenced (according to the decision of the Belgorod provincial office) to deprivation of rights, a whip, tearing of the nostrils and imprisonment in the Alexander Fortress. The empress replaced this punishment with life imprisonment in a monastery with deprivation of rights and maintenance for some time on bread and water. A similar punishment befell: Lieutenant Turbina; Solodilova; Bibikov; Milshin, who killed three serfs at once; Kulyabka.
Even high-ranking dignitaries could no longer disregard the law. The senate sentenced Prince Kantemir to "exile to work," despite the fact that Chertkov, the governor of Kharkov and Voronezh, strongly stood up for him. The Senate sentenced Prince Davydov to severe punishment, who killed his man with a cleaver, and again the Empress added to the exile laid down by the Senate, 4 weeks of maintenance on bread and water.
In all these cases, despite the high position of the murderers, the Senate recognized the murder and did not look for extenuating circumstances. In addition, for some time now, even if the landowner was not found guilty of murder, he was tried for arbitrariness, because the state, not the landowner, should punish the peasants for the offenses.
A certain von Ettinger was accused of torturing serfs, one of whom died as a result. From the Orenburg Provincial Chancellery, the case passed to the Senate, which imposed a very light punishment on the guilty person, namely: imprisonment for a month, church repentance and the withdrawal of a subscription, that henceforth she would not show such severity. However, on October 18, 1770, an imperial order was issued in this case, which indicated that Ettinger had tortured the serf for his escapes, that is, for cases “which are not subject to investigation by her, but are subject to city justice”, that the serf, in essence, , would be liable for escape to a state court, and that this abuse of power on the part of Ettinger by the senate was ignored.Revising its decision, the senate found that Ettinger had indeed appropriated the power of an official, and supplemented its first sentence with a decree for the confiscation of the Ettinger estate.
To the same punishment and for the same reasons was sentenced by the Senate to a prominent dignitary of that time, personally known to the Empress, General-in-Chief von Weymarn, who had beaten his servant Heidemann on suspicion of theft; this time the punishment was mitigated by the Empress, who ordered Weimarn to be reprimanded in the College of Justice and to recover 3,000 rubles from him. in favor of Heidemann.
Consequence
The Empress did not brush aside the paper, it was too painful for a large number of victims to be discussed there. Although Saltychikha belonged to a noble family, Catherine II used her case as a show trial that marked a new era of legality.
From the Office of Her Imperial Majesty, the denunciation of Ilyin and Martynov was submitted for consideration and decision to the Governing Senate. From there, he was transferred to the Moscow office of the Governing Senate, and then ended up in the College of Justice. There it was accepted into production (i.e., they began to consider it on the merits) on October 1, 1762. Although the Moscow Justice College was directly involved in detective cases in this case, the general management of the search was carried out from St. Petersburg by the Senate. It was this autonomy, which allowed the detectives not to obey the Moscow administration, as will become clear from the subsequent course of events, which made it possible to bring the search to the end.
In the Moscow College of Justice, the case fell into the hands of the most “mongrel” (that is, ignoble, without family and business ties) official - Stepan Volkov. In every organization there are two categories of workers: those who pull the line, do the job and remain unnoticed by anyone, and those who do trifles, but manage to be in front of the authorities and receive all the thanks. Court adviser Volkov was from the first category. When a command came from the northern capital to accept a complaint against Daria Saltykova for investigation, all the officials immediately realized that the matter was going to be risky: on the one hand, in St. because she has all of Moscow in her relatives. In short, wherever you throw it - everywhere is a wedge! Therefore, all of Volkov's more or less eminent colleagues managed to push this matter away from themselves, as they say.
The fact that it was the poorest and humblest investigator who took up this case may have predetermined the success of the entire investigation. In any case, it was thanks to him that the search, which lasted for several years, made it possible to stop the landowner who did not know any brakes. In submission to Volkov, a young court adviser, Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov, was appointed. Together, they actually "promoted" this case.
During the first year - until November 1763 - the investigators studied the account books arrested from Saltykova and interrogated witnesses. Numerous servants of the landowner, who lived in her Moscow house on Kuznetskaya Street, on Sretenka, were interviewed. Her servants from the estates in Troitsky (near Moscow) and in Vokshino were interrogated.
The study of the account books allowed the investigators to quite accurately determine the circle of officials of the Moscow administration who had warm relations with Daria Saltykova and received various kinds of presents from her. In addition, it was possible to trace the movement of serfs in the landowner's possessions: whom and to whom she sold, who went to work and crafts, who died, who signed up for the service staff.
Female mortality among serfs
A lot of interesting things have been revealed here. First of all, the percentage of officially deceased serfs seemed rather suspicious to the investigators, and the death rate among women far exceeded the death rate among men, which could not find any logical explanation. From the very beginning, the deaths of some people were presented as a consequence of a crime, which, however, no one thought to investigate. So, for example, in November 1759, the body of the deceased serf Saltykova Khrisanf Andreev with noticeable bodily injuries was presented to the Detective Order of Moscow. The investigation into his death was carried out by officials of the order with obvious and gross violations in the execution of documents, for example, documents dated early referred to later ones, which undoubtedly indicated forgery.
Saltychikha at work. Lubok picture of the 19th century
In addition, investigators from the College of Justice compiled a list of Saltykova's serfs by name, the circumstances of whose life or death, even according to the documents, seemed very suspicious. For example, a young, healthy, 20-lazy woman ended up in Saltykova's house as a domestic servant and died two weeks later. The deaths of Yermolai Ilyin's three wives were very suspicious, as the latter mentioned in a denunciation addressed to the Empress. Ilyin, by the way, held the position of Saltykova's "personal groom", that is, he was a person quite close to the landowner, in any case, who came into contact with her daily. Within three years, Yermolai Ilyin's three young wives died one by one. Saltykova, according to the entries in her house books, let some of her servants go to her patrimonial villages, but for some reason they either died immediately or disappeared there, so much so that no one could really say where these people are now .
In total, court adviser Volkov counted 138 (!) Saltykova's serfs, who, in his opinion, became victims of the mistress's crimes.
Along the way, the archives of the office of the Moscow civil governor, the Investigative Order, and the Moscow police chief were checked. It turned out that in the period 1756-62. 21 (!) Complaints were filed against Darya Saltykova by her serfs. For those dark times, it was a kind of record. Each of the complaints cited specific examples of beatings and subsequent deaths of serfs. Formally, all the complaints filed were properly checked, but its bias was not in doubt. The fate of the complainants was painful: the police returned them to the landowner, where they were followed by a strict "recovery", or put on trial "for slander". In the latter case, the complainants were sent to hard labor in Siberia. Like many landowners of that era, Daria Saltykova had her own prisons with torture chambers, decks, shackles, "chairs". Some of the scammers once got there, remained in prison for years and were released only thanks to the investigation that arose.
Arrest
Quite quickly, investigators from the Moscow College of Justice became convinced that Saltykova was obstructing justice. As long as this woman remained at large and controlled the lives of her slaves, the investigators could not count on the complete frankness of the witnesses. A domineering and self-confident woman spread an aura of permissiveness around her. Saltykova's servants, seeing the complete futility of complaints against the hostess, directly told Volkov and Tsitsianov that "there could be no justice against her" and, on this basis, refused to help the investigation.
Therefore, in an extract from the case dated November 6, 1763 and sent to the Governing Senate (in St. Petersburg), it was proposed to allow the investigation to resort to radical measures that could help obtain the necessary information. First of all, the capital was asked for permission to torture Daria Saltykova. In addition, the Justice College asked the Governing Senate to appoint a property manager for Saltykova, and to remove the suspect from managing estates and funds in order to make it impossible to intimidate serfs and give bribes to officials. Also, as one of the measures that could help justice, the investigators named a "general search" on the estates of Saltykova with a total interrogation of all the serfs who lived there.
At this point it is necessary to make a small digression. By the middle of the 18th century, Russian legislators were becoming more and more convinced that the use of torture should be limited. In the draft of the new Judicial Code (the so-called Code of 1742), an attempt was made to legislate restrictions on the torture of women in childbirth and pregnant women, children under 12 years old and the elderly over 70 years old, as well as insane people. Subsequently, this project was supplemented by a restriction on torture against persons belonging to the first eight ranks of the "Table of Ranks", the minimum age of the tortured was raised to 15 years, a ban was introduced on the torture of persons of the nobility, etc. Although these proposals did not officially enter into force (since the draft Code of 1742 itself was not adopted), however, the ideas of introducing various restrictions on torture were already in full swing in the air. By the beginning of the 60s of the 18th century, Russian senators openly discussed the possibility of introducing such norms restricting torture, such as, for example, "the severity of torture should not exceed the severity of the punishment imposed by the court" or "torture is unacceptable in a case where indisputable evidence of guilt has been obtained" etc. Emperor Peter the Third spoke out in favor of the prohibition of the use of torture to obtain evidence during the preliminary investigation; Empress Catherine II, who succeeded him on the throne, repeatedly spoke in the same spirit. That is why the Moscow Justice College appealed to the Governing Senate with a request to officially allow the torture of Daria Saltykova.
Such permission has not been obtained. In the “Saltykova case”, the Empress resorted to a directive repeatedly repeated subsequently to the investigators: torture should be used to intimidate the interrogated person, but it cannot be used. During her reign, this technique was repeated many times in a variety of (and important) investigations: in the "case of Vasily Mirovich", in the investigation of the conspiracy of Peter Khrushchev and Semyon Guryev, in the investigation of the "Pugachev case", etc. Some time will pass and November 8, 1774 d. The Empress will sign a secret Decree banning throughout the Empire torture during interrogation. This decree was not publicly announced with the aim that the townsfolk did not know about the ban that had appeared and continued to tremble at the threat of torture. One can argue about how moral it is to intimidate the interrogated with torture, but it should be recognized that since the 60s of the 18th century in Russia they stopped torturing suspects in the dungeons (although the executioners, of course, survived: they carried out the sentences of the courts in terms of imposing bodily punishments).
Otherwise, the request of the Moscow investigators was satisfied: Daria Saltykova was removed from managing her property and money, which, from January 1764, Senator Saburov, who was appointed "guardian" (now he would be called "temporary manager"), began to dispose of. Investigators also received permission to conduct a "general search in the houses and estates" of the suspect, if such a need arises.
The same case of Saltychikha, stored in the state archive.
At the beginning of February 1764, court adviser Stepan Volkov officially informed Daria Saltykova about taking her "under guard" and the forthcoming torture. According to tradition, a priest was assigned to her, who was to prepare the woman for trial and possible death, and also to persuade Saltykova not to bring the investigation to extreme cruelty. The priest of the Moscow Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker Dmitry Vasiliev, by order of the Moscow mayor, spent exactly a month in the company of Darya Nikolaevna; during all this time, he persuaded the suspect to cleanse her soul with a sincere confession and repentance. Saltykova listened to the priest, indulged in general discussions about religion and morality, but she did not admit her guilt and claimed that she had been slandered by the servants. After a month - March 3, 1764 - the priest submitted a report to the College of Justice, in which he officially informed the investigators about the failure of his mission: Saltykova did not stop her denial and "was prepared by him for inevitable torture."
Meanwhile, the investigators did not have sanctions for torture. But in order not to reduce the degree of psychological pressure on the suspect, Stepan Volkov decided on a rather cruel hoax: on March 4, 1764, Daria Saltykova, under strict military guard, was taken to the mansion of the Moscow police chief, where the executioner and officials of the search unit were also brought. The suspect was told that she was "delivered to be tortured." However, that day it was not her who was tortured, but a certain robber, whose guilt was not in doubt. Saltykova was present during the torture from beginning to end; cruelty of execution e. b. scare Saltykova and break her stubbornness. However, other people's suffering did not make a special impression on Darya Nikolaevna, and after the end of the "interrogation with passion", which she witnessed, the suspect, smiling, repeated in Volkov's face that "she does not know her guilt and will not slander herself." That. the investigator's hopes of intimidating Saltykova and thereby obtaining a confession of guilt were not crowned with success.
Such fearlessness of Darya Nikolaevna, most likely, had no moral force under it, but a banal awareness of the powers of the investigation. In any case, such an assumption seems to be the most reliable; as the subsequent course of events showed, Saltykova had good friends in the police environment, always ready to come to her aid.
However, Stepan Volkov did not calm down. The collegiate adviser once again wrote to St. Petersburg, hoping to get a sanction for "interrogation with prejudice." It is not difficult to understand the investigator: the confession of the suspect was considered as the most valuable evidence, and the theory of evidence within the framework of the law of that time was in its infancy. Volkov wanted to get official permission from the capital for the possibility of not only intimidating with torture, but also putting it into practice.
But on May 17, 1764, the 6th Department of the Governing Senate sent an order to Moscow to stop threatening Saltykova and witnesses in her case with torture: "(...) Her Imperial Majesty was ordered by decree not to repair either her (yard) people or torture ". The investigator had to reconcile himself and the question of the admissibility of torture was not raised in the investigation of the Saltykova case.
However, Volkov still had one more very effective instrument of inquiry in reserve: a general search.
General search on Sretenka
This investigative technique (quite common at that time) can be put in line with modern “cleansings”. In practice, a general search was carried out as follows: a large police team (garrison soldiers could be attached to it) blocked a settlement or a city block, and it was possible to get inside the cordon from the outside, but to get out - no, hence the saying: the entrance is a ruble, the exit - two). The police brigade interrogated without exception everyone who fell into the cordon, and, if necessary, conducted searches of any premises without any additional sanctions.
"General searches" stretched out for several days and were sometimes accompanied by individual interrogation of hundreds of people, and the persons awaiting interrogation and those who underwent it were kept separately. The effectiveness of this method of inquiry should not be underestimated; this technique was successfully used in the fight against large gangs of robbers who relied on accomplices who legally lived in cities and villages. The psychological effect was also important: the townsfolk saw numerous armed guards and were involuntarily imbued with a consciousness of the seriousness of the authorities' intentions, and the fear of slander from the neighbors usually pushed even the most timid witnesses to give frank and detailed testimony. The demonstrative activity of the detective and the fear of being accused of failure to report unleashed tongues better than any promise.
In the first ten days of June 1764, simultaneous general searches were carried out both in Moscow, in the quarter where the house of Darya Saltykova was located, and in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow, where, allegedly, the landowner sent her delinquent household.
Given the piety of Saltychikha, she must have been there.
However, this building was also rebuilt after the fire of 1812.
In Moscow, on Sretenka, the search was led by Stepan Volkov himself. The scale of the event can be judged by the fact that more than 130 people were interrogated alone! A significant part of those interrogated reported the exact dates of the murders committed by Saltykova and even named the names of the dead.
Among the crimes, which were told by residents of neighboring houses and priests of the Vvedensky Church and the Church of John Belogradsky (both located in the immediate vicinity of Saltykova's house), in particular, were:
- the murder of a 12-year-old courtyard girl (presumably Praskovya Nikitina) through prolonged beatings;
- the murder as a result of prolonged torture of 19-year-old Fekla Gerasimova (whose body was officially handed over to the 1st police team, where the priests saw the deceased);
- keeping serfs in shackles and logs (this was reported independently by four people who lived next door to Daria Saltykova's house);
- long-term maintenance of barefoot serfs in the winter in the snow (testimonies were given by nine witnesses);
- prolonged corporal punishment of the servants, during which Saltykova personally commanded the torturers "beat more!" (five witnesses).
It should be noted that 94 people interrogated by Stepan Volkov during the general search on Sretenka stated that they knew nothing about the crimes of Daria Saltykova.
In addition to the testimonies of the neighbors, the stories of the yard servant of the suspect turned out to be very important for the investigation. From the very beginning of the investigation, the serfs did not make any contact with Volkov. Apparently, disbelief in the power of the law dominated the intimidated and downtrodden people. Now, when the arrested lady lost the aura of personal immunity, the serfs gradually believed that the principled investigator would still be able to find justice for the presumptuous noblewoman.
An important result of the general search conducted in the Moscow house of Darya Saltykova was the discovery of a very remarkable ledger, filled in by the housekeeper Savely Martynov, which listed all the bribes distributed by Saltykova to officials of the Moscow administration. This most curious document revealed the extreme degree of corruption and unscrupulous greed inherent in prominent officials, thanks to which the murders committed in the very center of Moscow year after year were ignored by officials responsible for maintaining law and order and legality.
Among the persons who received valuable gifts and money from Darya Nikolaevna were: the head of the police office, real state councilor Andrey Ivanovich Molchanov, the prosecutor of the Detective order Fyodor Khvoshchinsky, those present at the Detective order, court advisers Lev Velyaminov-Zernov and Pyotr Mikhailovsky, secretary of the Secret Office Ivan Yarov, actuary of the Investigative Department Ivan Pafnutiev, etc. This explained why none of the complainants against Saltykova could find the truth in Moscow.
General search in Troitskoye
Simultaneously with the general search on Sretenka, a similar operation was carried out in the Trinity estate near Moscow and the village of the same name Saltykova, as well as the villages adjacent to it. In addition to Troitsky, some other settlements also got into the police cordon: the villages of Salarevo, Orlovo, Semenovskoye. The search was led by Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov, later (after the search in Moscow) Volkov came to his aid.
The Troitskoye estate (now the village of Mosrentgen) is now a very quiet and peaceful place. In the photo is the place where the manor house stood.
The number of people interrogated was in the hundreds. Only in the extract on the case, prepared in the following - 1765 - year, the testimony of almost 300 people interrogated by Tsitsianov during the general search is mentioned.
In general, the information obtained by the investigator related to the following criminal acts of Daria Saltykova:
- the murder in the summer of 1762 of the yard girl Fekla Gerasimova; information about this crime supplemented the information received by Volkov in Moscow. The elder of the village of Troitsky, Ivan Mikhailov, who directly transported the corpse of the tortured girl, gave incriminating testimony to Saltykov and named witnesses who could confirm the correctness of his words, in particular, police doctor Fyodor Smirnov, who examined the body of the murdered woman in the premises of the Moscow provincial office;
- beatings, torture by hunger and the subsequent deaths of the yard girls Afimya and Irina (which they reported in their deathbed confession to the priest of the Trinity Church Stepan Petrov);
- the facts of Saltykova's repeated and cruel mockery of her serfs were confirmed by a significant number of peasants in neighboring villages (80 people). However, it should be noted that none of them was a direct witness to the beatings and gave their testimony from hearsay;
- a significant number of Saltykova's serfs (22 people) told the investigation that they had heard from the servants of the mistress that she had committed repeated murders of people, but they themselves were not witnesses of such.
In general, the searches of Volkov and Tsitsianov made it possible to move the investigation forward sharply. Now the detectives had at their disposal a significant number of witnesses, on the basis of whose testimony it was possible to quite accurately reconstruct both the circumstances of the life of Saltykova herself and her servants. Recall that Volkov had a list of serfs in his hands, consisting of 138 names, the fate of which should be clarified, because they were all potential victims of their mistress. Of this list, 50 people were officially considered "dead from illnesses", 72 people were "missing without a trace", 16 were considered "left to her husband" or "gone on the run."
The serfs of Daria Saltykova accused their mistress of the death of 75 people. However, not all of the cases of murders alleged by Saltykova had witnesses or accomplices; a significant proportion of the applicants' statements were made with reference to missing or deceased persons, and therefore such statements required careful verification. In addition, some of the yard servants were involved in the crimes of the hostess (following her orders to beat people) and therefore, recognizing some events, these people categorically refused to recognize others. The latter circumstance noticeably confused the investigation, since it caused contradictions among the witnesses on a large number of facts.
Nevertheless, the investigators managed to separate the "wheat from the chaff" and, through a scrupulous comparison of a huge number of details, restore the bloody path of Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova, which had stretched for years. It makes sense to dwell on some of the most egregious (and at the same time characteristic) crimes of this landowner.
Three wives of Yermolai
First of all, the investigation was interested in the question of whether the three wives of Yermolai Ilyin (one of the two authors of the petition addressed to the Empress) were really tortured by Saltykova? In other words, had the informer misled the Empress?
It turned out that in March 1762, among the domestic servants of Saltykova, who permanently lived in her Moscow house, a kind of conspiracy was formed. The conspirators - the brothers Shavkunov, Tarnokhin, Nekrasov and Ugryumov - decided to inform the Moscow authorities about the atrocities of the lady.
I must say that this was far from the first attempt by the servants to inform the authorities about Saltykova's crimes, but for the first time not one, not two, but five people at once decided to make an agreed statement. Knowing that Darya Nikolaevna has excellent personal relations with the ranks of the Moscow police, five daredevils decided to file a complaint with the Senate office (that is, the branch of the Governing Senate in Moscow).
The serfs hid from the house of the landowner at night, but she missed the fugitives and sent a chase after them. Five servants, fearing reprisals on the spot, turned to the night police guard for help. The fugitives were detained, taken to the neighborhood, then escorted to the police chief's office. They were kept there for two weeks, during which they repeatedly announced the numerous murders of people committed by Saltykova, mentioning, among other things, the murder of Yermolai Ilyin's three wives.
The police tried to return the five servants to the mistress, but the people refused to go to her house, for which they were beaten by the police right on the street. In the end, all five were taken to the Senate office, where the applicants were officially interrogated and ... returned to Daria Saltykova. There, the fugitives were flogged and sent to Siberia. It was the unfortunate outcome of the escape of the brothers Shavkunov, Tarnokhin, Nekrasov and Ugryumov that led Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov to the idea of seeking the truth in St. Petersburg.
So, Stepan Volkov found out that denunciations about the murder of Ilyin's three wives had already been submitted before both to the police and to the Senate office. This, of course, increased the credibility of Yermolai Ilyin's statement. But besides this, the investigator for the first time learned the names of people who were direct witnesses to the murders of the mentioned wives. These were Mikhail Martyanov, Pyotr Ulyanov, Vasilisa Matveeva and Aksinya Stepanova. In addition, a significant number of people were able to confirm the presence on the bodies of dead women of obvious and, moreover, very significant bodily injuries (scab on open wounds, torn hair, traces of scalding with boiling water, burned ears, bruises, etc.; however, about the methods of killing Saltykova people will be discussed later). That. the investigation, thanks to a general search, was able to find confirmation that the three wives of Yermolai Ivanov were indeed killed by the landowner.
The story of the three wives of Yermolai Ivanov, restored by the investigation, turned out to be in general terms as follows: the first wife of the coachman lady was the "yard girl" Katerina Semenova, whose duty was to wash the floors in the master's house (she did this along with other servants). Having caused the displeasure of the hostess with poor washing of the floors, Semenova was flogged with batogs and whips, after which she died. This happened in 1759. The Moscow priest Ivan Ivanov was invited to the dying woman, who was content with the "deaf confession" of the dying woman (the woman could no longer speak) and allowed the body to be buried in the cemetery at the temple in which he served. Saltykova quickly married her coachman, because she did not want him to "languish without a woman." It can be assumed that Ivanov was in good standing with his mistress, in any case, she clearly did not want a young, well-informed peasant to walk in bachelors.
The second wife of Yermolai was the young Fedosya Artamonova, who was settled in the Moscow house of Saltykova and assigned various household chores. Very soon, Fedosya aroused the displeasure of the hostess and, like Katerina Semenova, was subjected to the most severe flogging. As a result, in the spring of 1761, Fedosya died, and Saltykova again called her good friend, priest Ivanov. He, however, was embarrassed by the obvious traces of violence visible on the face and body of the murdered woman and stated that he would not allow her to be buried as an ordinary deceased: they say, let Saltykova present the body to the police and receive official permission for burial. Darya Nikolaevna, of course, did not trouble herself; she ordered the corpse of Fedosya Artamonova to be taken to Troitskoye, so that the local priest Stepan Petrov would bury it without delay. And so it was done.
Less than six months later, Yermolai Ivanov, at the behest of the mistress, was married for the third time. The last wife - pretty and quiet Aksinya Yakovleva - was very fond of him. However, the age of Aksinya, like her predecessors, turned out to be very short-lived, she was killed at the end of February 1762. None of the witnesses could remember the reason for Daria Saltykova's anger: the landowner suddenly attacked the maid and began to beat her with her own hands. After several blows with her hands, Saltykova armed herself with a rolling pin, then, considering it not a serious enough tool, she grabbed a log. Witnesses Mikhail Martynov and Pyotr Ulyanov watched the murder scene from beginning to end, and a little later they were joined by Matveyeva and Stepanova. Saltykova called the last ones herself, so that they would give the beaten wine to drink and prepare for communion. The landowner ordered to call the priest, so that he would commune the dying woman and allow her to be buried in Moscow.
However, it was not possible to revive Aksinya Yakovlev. The woman died without regaining consciousness. Priest Ivanov, seeing a corpse with black bruises on the face and hands and jets of blood from the nose and ears, refused to bury Yakovlev. Saltykova ordered to take the murdered woman to Troitskoye and instruct the priest Petrov to bury Yakovlev. The order of the landowner was carried out by Aksinya Stepanova and the coachman Roman Ivanov (the latter was Saltykova's confidant and took part in many of her crimes). They handed over the body to the headman of the village, Ivan Mikhailov.
It is noteworthy that the murder of Aksinya Yakovleva caused a nervous breakdown Yermolai Ilyin, the husband of the deceased. The coachman cried and shouted, fearlessly threatened revenge on the fierce landowner, and his fury frightened her in earnest. Saltykova ordered to put him in her prison under guard. Yermolaya was guarded by two "haiduks" (guards) of the landowner, and he had to demonstrate feigned humility and ask for forgiveness from the mistress in order to get out of custody.
It should be noted that the investigation did not insist on Saltykova's guilt in the murder of Yermolai Ilyin's first two wives. Although a number of considerations incriminated the landowner, nevertheless, direct evidence and testimonies did not exist. In general, the investigation interpreted all doubts in favor of the suspect, recognizing only indisputable facts, firmly confirmed by several witnesses. Therefore, in the end, Saltykova was accused only of killing the third wife of her coachman, Aksinya Yakovleva.
Last victim
One of the most scandalous crimes of Daria Saltykova was the murder of Fekla Gerasimova. This courtyard girl turned out to be the last victim of the landowner, she died in July 1762, at the very time when the issue of initiating an investigation against Saltykova was already being decided in St. Petersburg.
Card. From the painting thin V. N. Pchelina. "Saltychikha". 20s of the 20th century
The woman, beaten in the Moscow house of Saltykova, was taken to the village of Troitskoye for burial. The headman was instructed to organize the funeral of Gerasimova, although the woman was still alive. There was no doubt that Gerasimova was subjected to the most severe beating; according to the elder Ivan Mikhailov, "and her hair was torn out, and her head was broken, and her back was rotten." Mikhailov, who until that time unquestioningly covered up the black deeds of the hostess and repeatedly put his signature as a witness under falsified entries in the church book (these entries certified the supposedly natural nature of the death of the buried), this time was indignant. It is difficult to say what prompted the headman to show integrity - either the rumors about the escape of Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov, or the March escape of 5 serfs to the Moscow Senate - but Mikhailov suddenly announced that he would not bury Gerasimova. He took the body of the woman who died in his arms back to Moscow, and tried to draw the attention of as many people as possible to this. The corpse of Thekla, disfigured by beatings, was seen not only by the villagers of Troitsky, but also by residents of other villages.
Mikhailov presented the corpse of a tortured woman in the office of the Moscow civil governor. The case was rather scandalous, none of the officials wanted to pretend that nothing was happening, and therefore they had to call doctors and inform the police about what had happened. Dr. Fyodor Smirnov officially examined the body and recorded numerous traces of bodily injuries in writing, his act was transferred to the detective police. The body of Gerasimova was also sent there. There, the body was received, examined, and after some time ... returned back to Troitskoye with an order to carry out the burial.
The plot of crimes
The investigation absolutely accurately established the time of the beginning of Saltykova's murders and tortures of her domestics. Until the death of her husband in 1756, no one noticed a particular tendency to assault Darya Nikolaevna. But about six months after the death of her husband, she began to increasingly resort to such a strange way of admonishing her servants as beating with a log. In the Moscow houses of that time, heated by stoves and fireplaces, firewood lay in almost every room; Darya Nikolaevna grabbed the first chock that came to hand and began to beat people with it. Gradually, the severity of the wounds inflicted in this way became stronger, and the beatings themselves became longer and more sophisticated. Saltykova began to use hot curling irons for torment (then they were called "cooking tongs"): with them she grabbed the offender by the ears. Daria Nikolaevna fell in love with "hair pulling", this procedure was accompanied by hitting a person's head against the wall and sometimes lasted for a quarter of an hour. Many people killed by her, according to the stories of witnesses, had almost no hair on their heads; Saltykova learned to tear her hair in strands (this is quite difficult and requires a lot of strength in the fingers).
Tired of the beatings, the serf-owner instructed her "haiduks" to continue the beatings. Her lackeys (read - guards) flogged the guilty with whips and sticks. Usually two or three "haiduks" took part in the beatings; the coachman Yermolai Ilyin, one of the denunciators of the Empress Saltykov, was among the trusted servants and regularly beat the guilty.
As early as 1757, systematic murders of people began in Saltykova's house. In December, the pregnant Anisya Grigorieva was beaten to death. During her section with batogs (this was done by the groom Bogomolov and the above-mentioned Yeromlai Ilyin on the orders of Saltykova), the woman had a miscarriage. Saltykova ordered Ilyin's wife (the same Katerina Semenova, who later herself died at the hands of the landowner) to bury the discarded fetus at the Vvedenskaya Church in Moscow; Semyonova at night, secretly fulfilled this order. Grigorieva died without receiving communion, and a visiting priest, Ivan Ivanov, refused to bury the body without official permission.
Police doctor Nikolai Telezhkin officially testified to the presence of numerous marks of beatings and open wounds on the body. Apparently, Anisya Grigorieva was dying for several days from blood poisoning, because the act signed by Telezhkin indicated putrefactive changes in the skin in the area of \u200b\u200bthe wounds; the text of his conclusion leaves no doubt as to the violent cause of the woman's death.
The husband of the deceased stated directly in the office of the police chief that his wife had died from the beatings of the landowner. Chronologically, this was the first official denunciation of the atrocities of Daria Saltykova. However, there was no reaction from the authorities to the message received: the body of Grigorieva was returned to the serf with official permission to carry out the burial, and the informer, Trofim Stepanov, was given to Saltykova for punishment. It was officially stated that the husband of the deceased had escaped, and therefore his denunciation was dictated by the desire to avoid punishment for his own crime. Stepanov was severely flogged and exiled to the distant estate of Saltykova, where he soon died.
The ease with which the landowner got out of a dangerous situation for her clearly turned her head. In subsequent years, beatings and murders took on a phantasmagoric character.
three men
Not only women died at the hands of Saltykova (although, mostly they did!), But also men, for example, in November 1759, during a torture that lasted almost a day, a young servant Khrisanf Andreev was killed, and in September 1761 Saltykova personally killed the boy Lukyana Mikheeva.
The mockery of Andreev was especially sophisticated: at the behest of Saltykova, he was stripped naked and subjected to whipping. Khrisanf was flogged by his own uncle, groom Fedot Bogomolov. No one counted the number of blows received by Andreev, it is only known that after the beating stopped, the young man could not stand on his feet. He was left for the night in the yard "in the snow", a guard was posted nearby. The next morning Chrysanthos was still alive; Saltykova ordered him to be brought to her office and for some time beat him with a stick with her own hands. Then, with hot curling irons, she began to drag Chrysanthos by the ears, after that she poured boiling water from the kettle on his head, and then beat him again with a stick. In the end, Saltykova began to beat the unconscious body with her feet. Tired, she ordered Andreev to be carried away. The unconscious servant from Saltykova's office was carried out in his arms by the "haiduk" Leontiev. It remains to be added that the whole fault of Khrisanf Andreev, who died two hours later, consisted in "bad supervision of washing the floors"; Andreev was supposed to supervise the maids, and, according to the landowner, he did not cope well with this assignment.
Saltychikha. Illustration of the work of P.V. Kurdyumov to the encyclopedic edition "The Great Reform" - the anniversary encyclopedic edition of 1911, dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the implementation of the Peasant reform in Russia.
The artist Kurdyumov, when creating the picture, used the text of V.I. Semevsky:
Saltychikha beat her people with a rolling pin, a roller, a stick, logs, an iron, a whip, a whip, set fire to the hair on her head, took her ears with red-hot tongs, poured boiling water on her face, beat her head against the wall. By her order, the grooms punished the yard with butts from rods, batogs, lashes, and whips. She shaved her people's heads, put on stocks and in this form ordered them to work; in winter, after punishment, she exposed barefoot people to frost; starved. (See "Peasants in the reign of Catherine II", vol. 1, p. 224)
It should be noted that the murder of Khrisanf Andreev was a kind of exception: Saltykova did not torture men like that anymore. Lukyan Mikheev, apparently, was killed by her through negligence - the landowner hit him several times with his head against the wall, after which the death of the boy followed. Most likely, Saltykova did not expect to kill him at all. The investigation established that, at the behest of the landowner, another man died - Nikifor Grigoriev - but the reprisal against him was of an indirect nature, Grigoriev was beaten by "haiduks", while Saltykova herself did not touch him with a finger.
The list of men killed by Saltykova was exhausted by the three persons mentioned above. The bias towards female servants was obvious, although for some reason the investigation was not interested in the reason for such a strange preference (although this should have been done). In general, the investigator Volkov came to the conclusion that Darya Saltykova was "undoubtedly guilty" of the death of 38 people and "left in suspicion" regarding the guilt in the death of another 26 people. Regarding the guilt in the death of 11 people, the suspect was acquitted (or no charges were brought against Saltykova at all in their murder). The investigation considered that some of Saltykova's serfs wanted to slander the landowner and slandered her. Among such slanders, one can mention the testimony of a certain Vasily Antonov about the execution by order of the landowner of the village sorceress Irina Alekseeva, as well as the statement of Rodion Timofeev about the torture and subsequent murder of six "yard girls". It must be admitted that the investigation of the Justice College was carried out objectively and exactingly, without an obvious accusatory bias; all doubts about the veracity of the witnesses, all inconsistencies in their testimony were interpreted in favor of the suspect. The more valuable and more reliable the result!
Three questions
In particular, the investigation focused on three important issues that were not directly related to the murders of people committed by Saltykova, but that worried people and required clarification.
Lubok picture of the 19th century. Saltychikha atrocities
First, starting in 1764 and in subsequent years, rumors began to spread in Moscow, and then in other cities of Russia, that Saltykova not only killed people, but also ate human meat. Ignorant townsfolk explained precisely the culinary preferences of Darya Nikolaevna by her choice of women as victims (people believed that female meat should be more tender than male meat, and preliminary flogging of a person led to the separation of meat from bones, enabling the cannibal to get a high-quality tenderloin).
The investigation established with absolute certainty that all talk on this topic is groundless - Daria Saltykova never ate human meat and never gave orders to dismember the bodies of the people she killed. The accusation of cannibalism was never brought against her due to the lack of any grounds for it.
Secondly, the indictment specifically emphasized the fact that, in addition to the dead, a significant number of domestic servants systematically endured the most severe bullying and beatings from their mistress. Sometimes only a miracle saved the punished from seemingly inevitable death. So, for example, the oldest maid Agrafena Agafonova, taken to the Saltykovs' house by the late master Gleb Alekseevich in 1750, after the death of the latter, began to be subjected to systematic cavils from Darya Nikolaevna. At the end of 1756, on the orders of Saltykova, Agafonova was severely beaten by "haiduks" and her arms and legs were broken in several places. The woman turned into an invalid was sent to a distant estate, thanks to which she remained alive.
Many other servants of the landowner endured the cruelest bullying: Ekaterina Ustinova, the wife of the stableman Shavkunov, was beaten with an iron, Akulina Maksimova burned all the hair on Saltykov’s head with her own hand with a torch, etc. its extremes, extreme manifestations; the terror itself did not actually stop. The objects of persecution of Darya Saltykova were not only the wives of the groom Yermolai Ilyin, who were killed by her, but also the wives of other servants - Shavkunov and Yudin. The list of persons who suffered from Daria Saltykova, presented by the Justice College, included 75 people (we repeat, only 38 of them were unconditionally recognized as dead as a result of beatings).
Thirdly, the investigators specifically investigated the issue of Saltykova's preparation for the murder of the nobleman Nikolai Andreevich Tyutchev. This captain, who worked in the provincial committee of lands and destinies, was engaged in surveying, that is, drawing boundaries on the ground between the lands of various owners. The position is very important, taking into account the fact that all the nobility of that time fed from land plots.
Tyutchev - unsuccessful love, failed last victim
The young captain, who in 1760 was engaged in reconciling the borders of Saltykova's estates near Moscow with entries in the land cadastre, became the lover of a young widow (Daria Nikolaevna was then 30 years old). Everything was fine at first, but in January 1762 Tyutchev was about to marry another.
Saltykova decided to destroy the unfaithful lover, and to do it in the most literal sense. The groom Savelyev bought 2 kg of gunpowder in two steps, which, after adding sulfur and tinder, was wrapped in flammable hemp. It turned out to be a powerful bomb.
By order of Saltykova, two attempts were made to plant this bomb under the Moscow house in which Captain Tyutchev and his bride lived. Both attempts failed because of the fear of the sent serfs before retribution. Timid grooms - Ivanov and Savelyev - were brutally whipped, but unsuccessful attempts to blow up the house forced Saltykova to reconsider the plan.
She decided to organize an ambush on the captain's route to Tambov, where he was supposed to go on business in April 1762. In an ambush, b. 10-12 men from Saltykova's estates near Moscow will participate.
The matter turned out to be serious: an attack on a nobleman when he was fulfilling a state task was no longer drawn to robbery, but to a conspiracy! This threatened the peasants not even with hard labor, but with beheading. The serfs, who knew about the successful escape of the peasants with a complaint about the saltychikha, were again afraid and threw an anonymous letter to the captain, in which they warned him about the impending assassination attempt on him.
Tyutchev officially notified the authorities of a possible attack and received 12 soldiers as guards during the journey to Tambov. Saltykova, having learned about the captain's protection, canceled the attack at the last moment.
The investigators of the Justice College, having studied the information about the preparation of the assassination attempt on Tyutchev, considered it reliable and admitted that Saltykova really bought gunpowder and prepared an ambush for the captain. Therefore, the suspect was found guilty of "malicious intentions against the life of Captain Tyutchev."
Mutual responsibility
Investigators could not help but dwell on the concealment of Saltykova's crimes by officials of the Moscow administration. Now such an interaction between law enforcement officers and a criminal would be called "corruption", but in those days they did not use such a term, they said differently: mutual responsibility. The officials covered by such were, by order of Saltykova, entered in a special notebook; in the same place, records were made about the sums of money and various goods transferred to officials in the form of gratitude (hay, firewood, honey, pig carcasses, geese, etc.). The presence of such a notebook, on the one hand, greatly facilitated the task of the investigation, and on the other hand, put Volkov in an extremely delicate position: Saltykova's friends were too high.
In January 1765, the Justice College circulated among the officials of the city administration, the police and the spiritual department a demand to declare the bribes received from Saltykova. The detectives hoped that the corrupt officials would turn themselves in and denounce themselves, thus saving the investigators from having to prove anything. The calculation was not justified: not a single official announced that he had received any gifts from Saltykova.
The position of corrupt officials improved markedly after the death in October 1764 of the Moscow priest Ivan Ivanov, who buried the people killed by Saltykova without confession and communion. The priest's papers were in great disarray: no documents were found in Ivanov's archive, obtained from the police chief's office, on the basis of which the priest was allowed to bury corpses with obvious bodily injuries. These documents would make it possible to name the official who covered up the crimes of Daria Saltykova, however, the disappearance of these papers did not allow this. It is difficult to say when and by whom the dangerous documents were destroyed - whether Ivanov himself did it, or one of the policemen after his death - this remained unclear.
Even more, the situation of those suspected of bribery improved after the court councilor Peter Mikhailovsky died unexpectedly in February 1765. This man worked in the Investigative Department and often helped Saltykova "to hide the ends in the water." Mikhailovsky liked to drink, and on this basis he could be considered a weak link in the chain of bribe takers.
But even after the deaths of Ivanov and Mikhailovsky, the investigation had a real opportunity to bring the criminals to clean water. However, this did not happen. All the officials interrogated in the Saltykova case - state councilor Molchanov, prosecutor Khvoshchinsky, court councilor Velyaminov-Zernov, actuary Pafnutiev - denied their involvement in concealing the crimes and swore an oath on the Holy Scriptures.
The suspects were greatly helped by the mistakes made in the testimony of Saltykova's serfs. So, for example, the groom Roman Ivanov, who took food to the house of Velyaminov-Zernov, claimed that the court adviser lived on Ordynka Street; in fact, Velyaminov-Zernov's house was located on Kuznetskaya Street. And the clerk Savely Martynov, who personally filled out a notebook with a list of bribes, erroneously stated that Saltykova had presented the actuary Pafnutiev with the serf Gavril Andreev. A check, according to the lists of the Moscow serf office (property rights to serfs were registered there), showed that Saltykova sold Andreev in 1761 for 10 rubles to a certain Agafya Leontyeva. The latter, in turn, gave Gavrila Andreev to her friend Anisya Smirnova, who was the great-aunt of Pafnutev's wife. It was in this way that the mentioned serf appeared in Pafnutev's house. The investigators failed to interrogate Gavril himself: in March 1765, he fled from his mistress, stealing 200 rubles from her.
There were other inconsistencies in the testimony of the serfs. By and large, they did not at all refute the striking facts of corruption among the Moscow bureaucracy, but the investigation clearly did not want to demonstrate an accusatory bias in this direction. Based on formal inconsistencies in the testimonies of the Justice College, Saltykova's accomplices were released from criminal prosecution, recognizing them as "formally cleared of suspicion." It is impossible not to recognize the obvious tension of this wording: we recall that in five and a half years, Saltykova's serfs filed 21 (!) Official complaints (or denunciations) against her and none of these appeals was properly considered by the authorities. The unwillingness of the Moscow police and officials of the city administration to consider the appeals of the serfs on the merits cannot be explained by anything other than the bribery of Saltykova.
Sentence
In the spring of 1765, the investigation in the Moscow Justice College was formally completed and sent for further consideration to the 6th Department of the Governing Senate. The supreme body of the judicial power of the Russian Empire at that time functioned quite differently from the current courts. There was no competitiveness of the court in the modern sense: the parties and witnesses were not invited to participate in the meetings, respectively, there were no interrogations and debates. The senators studied the investigative proceedings on the "extract", a brief note compiled from fragments of documents essential for understanding the case. If something in the extract seemed incomprehensible or doubtful, the senator could refer to the original source document, but this was the exception rather than the rule: senators usually did not work with the investigative file itself. But solicitors worked with him, preparing a report on the case for a meeting of the Senate Department and various information on the case. Much depended on the solicitors, they could focus on some circumstances and retouch others, so there were frequent attempts to bribe Senate officials by interested parties. If a senator - a nobleman and a very rich man - was very problematic to bribe (and this was the guarantee of the objectivity of the Senate court), then it was incomparably easier to give a bribe to the solicitor.
The latter circumstance, back in tsarist times, led to the appearance of a considerable number of accusatory and satirical maxims, which since the time of Herzen were not stingy with the enemies of the autocracy. But by and large, there is no reason to consider the Senate court more inert or more corrupt than the highest courts in other European countries; one can say that he was quite in keeping with the spirit of his time.
It was unlikely that anyone could doubt that the court verdict would be guilty: the evidence presented by the investigation was too eloquent and convincing, and the spirit of Catherine hovered over the senators invisibly, not allowing their sense of class solidarity to triumph over common sense. For more than three years, the consideration of the "case of the murderer Saltykova" in the sixth department of the Senate dragged on; in the end, the judges found the defendant guilty of murdering and torturing courtyard people "without leniency." The wise senators did not issue a specific verdict, but sent a report to the Highest name, shifting the burden of making a decision on the monarch's shoulders. Such self-elimination of judges was quite legal: the Monarch was the source of law and, in principle, could make any decisions on court cases of any subordination. Since Catherine the Second stood at the origins of this case, it was up to her to finish it - so, apparently, the judges judged.
During the second half of September 1768, the Empress returned several times to the question of the final sentence for Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova. At least four rough drafts of the sentence are known, made by the Empress herself. Apparently, this question was extremely interested in Catherine II, who found herself in a very difficult dilemma: on the one hand, guided by the letter of the law, Saltykov should have been executed, and on the other, this should not have been done, since the Empress worked hard to create her own image in the eyes of her contemporaries as " humane and child-loving" ruler.
Finally, on October 2, 1768, Empress Catherine II sent a decree to the Governing Senate, in which she described in detail both the punishment imposed on Saltykov and the procedure for its administration. This decree is textually reproduced in volume 125 of the "Archive of the Governing Senate" and in view of its rather large size it does not make sense to bring it here, those who are interested can read it and. But we can dwell on the main points of this very curious document.
Daria Saltykova was referred to in it with the most derogatory epithets, such as: "an inhuman widow", "a freak of the human race", "a completely God-accessible soul", "a tormentor and a murderer", etc. father or husband, including in court (that is, Saltykova was forbidden to indicate her noble origin and family ties with other noble families); serving for an hour a special "reproachful spectacle", during which Saltykova had to stand on a scaffold chained to a pole with the inscription "tormentor and murderer" above her head (this punishment can be considered a prototype of a civil execution); to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only with the head of the guard and a female nun). Interestingly, by the decree of Catherine of June 12, 1768, Saltychikha was deprived not only of all rights and all property, but also decided to continue to "call this monster a man."
In addition, the Empress, by her decree of October 2, 1768, decided to return to her two sons all the property of the mother, which until then had been in the guardianship, and to punish Daria Saltykova's accomplices. These were recognized as the priest of the village of Troitsky Stepan Petrov, as well as one of the "haiduks" and grooms of the landowner (unfortunately, these people were not named in the decree, and therefore it is not entirely clear which servants were in question, perhaps they were footman Leontiev and groom Ivanov who participated in so many massacres of Saltykova).
Punishment
The punishment of the condemned landowner was carried out on October 17, 1768, on Red Square in Moscow. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, already a few days before this date, the ancient capital of Russia began to seethe in anticipation of reprisals. Both the public announcement of the upcoming event (in the form of publications in leaflets read out by officers in all crowded squares and intersections of Moscow) and the distribution of special "tickets" that all Moscow nobles received contributed to the general excitement. On the day of the massacre, Red Square was completely filled, people crowded into the windows of the buildings overlooking the square and occupied all the roofs.
At 11 o'clock in the morning, Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova was taken to the square under the guard of mounted hussars; in a black wagon next to the former landowner were grenadiers with drawn swords. Saltykova was forced to climb a high scaffold, where the decree of Empress Catherine II dated October 2, 1768 was read out. After an hour, Saltykova was brought down from the scaffold and put into a black wagon, which, under a military guard, went to the Ivanovo Convent (on Kulishki). On the same scaffold on the same day, priest Petrov and two servants of the landowner convicted in the Saltykova case were subjected to flogging and branding. All three were sent to hard labor in Siberia.
In the monastery, where the convict arrived after the punishment on Red Square, a special cell was prepared for her, called "repentant". The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (i.e., 2.1 m), it was completely below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of daylight getting inside. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only at the time of eating she was given a candle stub. Saltykova was not allowed to walk, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence. On major church holidays, Saltykova was taken out of her prison and taken to a small window in the wall of the temple, through which she could listen to the liturgy. A special board fence, which closed the space between the exit from the cell and the window, did not allow outsiders to see Saltykova and thus prevented all communication with people.
For spiritual guidance, the abbess of the monastery was allowed to Saltykova. Unfortunately, we do not know anything about whether the prisoner repented of anything, whether she asked for communion, whether she found any justification for her actions, etc. There are no documents about Saltykova’s behavior in captivity and her conversations with the abbess of the monastery in the synodal archive not preserved.
It remains to be added that Saltykova's detention regime symbolized "burial alive." For all its severity, such a regime was not something exceptional for that time, many prisoners 
Solovetsky monastery, for example, were kept in similar or more difficult conditions.
Daria Saltykova was kept in the underground prison until 1779, that is, 11 years. Then there was a noticeable relaxation in the regime of her detention: Daria Saltykova was transferred to a stone annex to the cathedral church of the Ivanovo Monastery (in the figure - a small annex on the left), in which there was a barred window.
Cathedral Church of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow. Saltychikha was imprisoned in a stone annex (on the left).
Visitors to the monastery were allowed to look through this window and even talk to the prisoner. The memoirs of contemporaries have been preserved that many residents of Moscow and visitors came to the Ivanovo Monastery themselves and brought their children with them specifically to look at the famous "Saltychikha".
According to the historian G.I. Studenkin, at the same time she:
"swearing, spitting and sticking a stick through the bars into an open, in the summer, window, thereby revealing her inveterate atrocity, which did not extinguish in her either remorse for atrocities, or the languor of long-term imprisonment in a gloomy rivet. Who saw the saltychikha at the end of the last century is now deceased State Councilor Rudin told P. G. Kicheev that she was full of herself and was already in advanced years, and from her movements it seemed that she was not completely sane ... "
To annoy her, the children allegedly even came up with a song:
Saltychikha-boltychikha, and high deacon!
Vlasyevna Dmitrovna Savivsha, old lady!...
Already after 1779, Saltykova gave birth to a child from a guard soldier; however, the reliability of this information is not great, since by this time the convict should have already been about 50 years old.
After death
It is impossible not to note the hypocrisy of the empress, who pursued the criminal, but wished not to notice the vile tricks of her patrons. By and large, the story of Saltykova can tell us about our ancestors no less than the works of Fonvizin and Karamzin, although, of course, this story will turn out to be completely unromantic.
After her death, the chamber in the church was adapted as a sacristy. Unfortunately, the historical church has not survived to the present day: it was dismantled in 1861.
Saltychikha's grave at the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow
Her grave is located in the fourth section of the cemetery at the Donskoy Monastery. There, still in the wild, she bought a plot, and there she was buried in a double grave with her eldest son, who died at the same time in the same 1801. There is even an inscription visible from the side of the collapsed sarcophagus (her eldest son).
From the story of G.I. Studenkin, "Saltychikha". Journal "Russian Antiquity" 1874 volume 10:
The evil memory of her was preserved among the people. The decree of Catherine II, dated October 2, 1768, went from hand to hand in printed copies and in many handwritten lists. The personification of her shameful kazpi passed even to popular prints. The word "Saltychikha" turned into a curse.
Indeed, for many decades, Daria Saltykova remained in the memory of the people as an example of the most inhuman sadism. Rumor accused the hated "Saltychikha" even of such crimes that she did not actually commit (for example, cannibalism).
Psychiatry
Although the general plot of the investigation of Saltykova's crimes is quite simple and does not raise any special questions, one cannot but admit that the motivation for the actions of the landowner remained unclear. The investigation did not establish what caused Saltykova's uncontrollable aggressiveness, to be more precise, the investigation did not ask this question at all. For some time now they began to look at Darya Nikolaevna as if she were crazy; meanwhile, such a view is hardly justified.
It is known that Saltykova was a woman who was not very intellectually developed. She did not know how to write, and all documents that required her signature were signed by her eldest son. At the same time, illiteracy did not at all prevent the development of a strong religious feeling in Saltykova’s soul: she strictly monitored the observance of external Orthodox rituals, went on pilgrimage to Moscow monasteries, and even made a rather lengthy pilgrimage to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. It is known that the criminal was a generous donor for churches and monasteries. There is no reason to suspect that Saltykova's religiosity was ostentatious and insincere; her power and influence were such that there was no need for her to break the comedy and do what she did not want to.
The fact that a sincerely believing person committed those monstrous atrocities in which Saltykova is guilty objectively testifies to the existence of a serious psychiatric anomaly in him. Most likely, Saltykova was an epileptoid psychopath, since it is this category of patients that is most prone to unmotivated and extremely brutal murders. Epileptoid psychopaths commit their attacks in a state of dysphoria (from the Greek "disphoria" - irritation), an unmotivated viciously gloomy mood, the tension of which cannot be removed without conflict. In many features of his pathological personality, this person resembles an epileptic (this explains the use of the word "epileptoid"), although such a psychopath is not an epileptic. This category of people demonstrates a number of specific behavioral traits that distinguish them from other psychopaths, for example: a) an unreasonably gloomy and dreary mood, intensifying over several days; b) sadism, manifested in relation to both animals and people; c) the inability to quickly extinguish anger even after the external cause of its occurrence has been eliminated (in psychiatry, such stability of an emotion or experience is called "rigidity"); d) inability to control anger even in cases where the development of the conflict poses a danger to the psychopath himself; e) relatively low sexual activity, aggravated by an abnormal attraction (the latter is understood as jealousy, which has reached extreme forms of expression); f) a tendency to hoarding, prudent spending of material assets and funds.
All of the above features of an epileptoid psychopath can be seen in the behavior of Daria Saltykova. She was a gloomy, unsmiling woman, always in a bad mood. The sadistic inclinations of this woman are very fully described in the investigative proceedings, and this essay gives an idea of how exactly Saltykova mocked the "guilty" people in her understanding. The beatings of the serfs sometimes dragged on for many hours and even days (here it is - the rigidity of emotions!) And the quick murder of the boy Lukyan Mikheev was not the rule of Saltykova, but just the same exception to the rule. The fact that Saltykova poorly controlled her anger was especially well manifested in the assassination attempts on Captain Tyutchev. Unsuccessful attempts to blow up the house did not stop the criminal, and only giving Tyutchev military protection forced Saltykov to finally abandon her plan. The history of relations with Captain Tyutchev confirms the thesis about Saltykova's low sexual activity; in fact, this was the only man in the life of a young widow for six years. At the same time, the landowner was insanely jealous of her chosen one and could not forgive him for choosing another woman.
It can be assumed that the assumption of Saltykova's epileptoid psychopathy describes well certain features of her behavior, but the lack of information about the childhood period of development does not allow us to unequivocally state that such an assumption is unconditionally true. Russian psychiatrist P. B. Gannushkin, who first formulated the very concept of "psychopathy" as an anomaly of character, pointed to the stability of the manifestation of pathological traits that are already noted at an early age. With regard to Saltykova, there are no such observations left; the investigators of the College of Justice, for obvious reasons, were not interested in the childhood and youth of the criminal.
Of course, Saltykova's choice of another victim was influenced by her gender and age. Of the nearly four dozen people tortured by her (and this is only the proven number of deaths!) Only two were men and one boy, the rest were young women and girls. The choice of objects of encroachment testifies to the latent homosexuality of Saltykova. During the investigation, no one ever accused her of inclinations towards same-sex sex, moreover, Saltykova herself would most likely reject such suspicions with indignation. Meanwhile, if the assumption about the epileptoid psychopathy of this criminal is correct, then her homosexuality does not in the least contradict the described features of the manifestation of this behavioral pathology. Many epileptoids demonstrate homosexuality, and unlike other psychopaths, they always play an active role in sex. Epileptoids tend to humiliate and beat a person who is sexually interesting to them, and in such cases they always act extremely rudely. You can say this: refined sadistic tricks are not for them. The fact that Saltykova pursued young girls and women indirectly indicates her sexual interest in them.
Of course, all of the above has a subjunctive mood. No one conducted a psychiatric examination of Daria Saltykova, since the science of psychiatry itself did not exist in those days. But those defects in her behavior and character, which made an indelible impression on her contemporaries, from the point of view of modern scientific ideas about counting, find fairly simple explanations and do not at all seem mysterious.
It must be emphasized that Saltykova was by no means a crazy woman. She was fully aware of the criminality of her own behavior, this is clearly seen from the stubbornness with which she denied even the most obvious evidence and convincing accusations. Considering herself a sincere Christian, she did not even think that pilgrimage trips and generous donations by no means cancel the Christian attitude towards living people. But the inability to understand this, in general, simple, thought does not stem from Saltykova's mental retardation, but rather is a defect in her upbringing. The bitterness of the situation lies in the fact that in the conditions of serfdom, callous, arrogant, unscrupulous people received the right to dispose of the lives of their serfs simply by virtue of their noble origin.
This happens quite rarely.
Saltychikha is not a unique phenomenon in world history. We know the names of no less terrible criminals. For example, Gilles de Re - "Bluebeard" - killed more than 600 children in the 15th century, and for example, a hundred years before Saltychikha, there lived a "bloody countess" in Hungary ...
Elizabeth Bathory of Eched(1560 - 1614), also called Chakhtitskaya pani or Blood Countess
- a Hungarian countess from the famous Bathory family, infamous for the serial murders of young girls. The exact number of her victims is unknown. The Countess and four of her servants were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610. The largest number of victims named during the trial of Bathory, 650 people.
However, this number comes from the statement of a certain woman named Shushanna, who allegedly found a list of the countess's victims in one of Bathory's private books and reported this to the participant in the trial of the countess, Jacob Silvashi. However, the book was never found and was not mentioned again in Silvasi's testimony. Despite all the evidence against Elizabeth, her family's influence kept the Blood Countess from being brought to justice.
The history of serial killings and brutality of Bathory is proven by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and victims, as well as physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated bodies of already dead, dying and imprisoned girls found during the detention of the Countess.
In December 1610, Báthory was imprisoned in the Hungarian castle of Ceyte, where the countess was immured in a room until her death four years later.
"Second Saltychikha" the people called the wife of the landowner Koshkarov, who lived in the 40s of the 19th century in the Tambov province. She found particular pleasure in tyranny over defenseless peasants. Koshkarova had a standard for torture, from the limits of which she went only in extreme cases. Men were supposed to give 100 blows with a whip, women - 80 each. All these executions were carried out by the landowner personally.
The pretexts for torture were most often various omissions in the household, sometimes very insignificant. So, the cook Karp Orlov Koshkarova was whipped with a whip for the fact that there were few onions in the soup.
Another "Saltychikha" found in Chuvashia. In September 1842, the landowner Vera Sokolova beat to death the yard girl Nastasya, whose father said that the mistress often punished her serfs "by flaying their hair, and sometimes forced them to flog with rods and whips." And another maid complained that “the mistress broke her nose with her fist, and from punishment with a whip on her thigh there was a scar, and in winter she was locked in a latrine in one shirt, because of which she froze her legs” ...
Video lecture about Saltychikha
Video investigation of the Saltychikha case
Myths, fakes and portraits of namesakes
For some reason, very often the narrow-minded authors of articles about the Saltychikha think that if they found a portrait of Daria Saltykova, then this is exactly her, the Saltychikha. This is not true.
In fact, there were no lifetime portraits left of Saltychikha, there are only popular prints and fantasy paintings painted much later than her death.
But since the surname was noble, there are a lot of branches in it, there are portraits of "other" Saltykovs, whom for some reason, not very smart people, without any checks, rank as portraits of the Saltychikha.
For example, Daria Petrovna Saltykova from the portrait on the left has nothing to do with Saltychikha, but everyone stubbornly sticks her portrait into their pseudo-articles and under-reports.
This is NOT a saltychiha! Let's see who this stately lady really is:
Daria PETROVNA Chernysheva-Saltykova (1739-1802). Lady of State, Cavalier Lady of the Order of St. Catherine, 1st Class, sister of Princess N. P. Golitsyna, wife of Field Marshal Count I. P. Saltykov.
François Hubert Drouet the Younger. Portrait of Countess D.P. Chernysheva-Saltykova. 1762
The eldest daughter of the diplomat Count Pyotr Grigoryevich Chernyshev, the godson of Peter the Great, who was considered by many to be his son. Her mother, Countess Ekaterina Andreevna, was the daughter of the well-known head of the secret office under Biron, Count Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov.
Darya Petrovna spent her childhood and young years abroad, where her father was for many years an envoy to the Danish, Berlin and English courts and an ambassador to Paris. There she received that brilliant upbringing, which put her, as well as her sister, Princess Natalya Petrovna Golitsyna, known as "Princesse Moustache", among the most educated Russian women of the late 18th century. They possessed refined manners, secular gloss, were fluent in four languages, but did not know Russian well. Returning with her parents to Russia in 1765, Daria was granted Catherine II as a lady-in-waiting.
She lived during the crimes of the Saltychikha at court, in St. Petersburg.
The creators of the historical series "Catherine. Rise" generally directly call Saltychikha a countess! Well, which of the widows of the captain is the countess ?! Apparently they spent the budget on something more necessary than a historical consultant. Indeed, why is it needed for a historical series ;-)
She is in a more advanced age in the figure on the right.
Ritt, Augustine Christian - Portrait of Countess D.P. Saltykova, 1794
I also came across a myth in fairly serious literature that supposedly Napoleon, having taken Moscow, wished to see this "curiosity". This is a fiction even based on the fact that Saltychikha died 11 years before Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Most likely, the information about the child allegedly born by her in prison is also not true. At the age of more than 50 years, in the conditions of modern medicine and living in prison, such a pregnancy is simply unbelievable, and if it happened, the birth would most likely end sadly for both the mother and the child.
Saltychikha also has a "folk" tombstone - the one in which it is buried according to "secret folk knowledge", 
passed down from generation to generation. Some strange personalities draw flowers on it, put lamps on it ... The infantry general buried under it in fact, in the next world, could be pleased with such attention! Well, unless, of course, you count the felt-tip graffiti applied to the tombstone with the name of Saltychikha instead of the fallen off plate with the name of the real owner ...
This is NOT Saltychikha's grave!
B. Akunin in his "Cemetery Stories" also followed the lead of "secret knowledge" and suggested that Saltychikha's grave in the cemetery at the Donskoy Monastery was there (see left).
In the series "Bloody Lady" from the channel "Russia 1" they told about the first of the famous serial killers in Russia, the landowner Daria Saltykova, who brutally killed about a hundred of her peasants. Since in the documents of the 18th century only a sentence remained about this lady (Catherine II ordered to destroy other evidence), the authors of the series were free to think out the image of Saltychikha and her biography. The result was a melodrama with a very dosed element of sadism.
But how was it really? We offer to recall the life of the real Saltychikha - "a freak of the human race." Whom the legendary landowner really loved, hated and killed.
As soon as contemporaries and descendants called Daria Saltykova, who went down in history under the name of Saltychikha: “black widow” and “black villain”, “Satan in a skirt”, “sadistic noblewoman”, “serial killer”, “bloody landowner”, “ Trinity cannibal”, “Marquis de Sade in female form”… Her name was pronounced with a shudder for many decades, and Empress Catherine the Great, in her sentence to the villain, which she personally rewrote several times, even avoided calling this monster woman “she”.
The story told by director Yegor Anashkin in the new series "The Bloody Lady" is close to what happened in real life, but in many ways softer than harsh reality. Because if the director filmed the most terrible atrocities that, as they say, Saltychikha committed, the film would most likely simply be banned.
A pious girl from a good family
On March 11, 1730, a girl was born in the family of the pillar nobleman Nikolai Ivanov, who was named Daria. Daria's grandfather, Avton Ivanov, was a prominent statesman of the era of Peter the Great and left a rich legacy to his descendants.
How the real childhood of Dasha Saltykova went is not known for certain. According to the version shown in the film, it was unhappy. After the death of his wife Anna, Nikolai Ivanov sent his daughter to be raised in a monastery with the wording "possessed by demons."
Francois Hubert Drouet, "Portrait of Countess Darya Chernyshova-Saltykova", 1762. This portrait has long been considered a portrait of Saltychikha
In her youth, a girl from a prominent noble family was known as the first beauty, and besides this, she stood out for her extreme piety. Although the real appearance of Saltychikha is a secret with seven seals. What she looked like is not known for certain, and those portraits that for many years were considered portraits of Saltychikha actually depict other women.
Most often, for the portraits of Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova, they took numerous portraits of her namesake and relative by husband, Darya Petrovna Saltykova, nee Chernysheva, the wife of Field Marshal Ivan Petrovich Saltykov, who was 9 years younger than the landowner.
At the age of 20, Daria married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov. The Saltykov family was even more noble than the Ivanov family - Gleb Saltykov's nephew Nikolai Saltykov would become the Most Serene Prince, Field Marshal and be a prominent courtier in the era of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I.
Soon, Daria gave birth to her husband's two sons - Fedor and Nikolai, who, as it was then expected, were enlisted from birth to serve in the guards regiments.
Fyodor Lavrov in the image of Gleb Saltykov in the TV series "Bloody Lady" (real images of Saltychikha's husband have not been preserved)
It was a typical marriage for its time - two noble families united to increase wealth. Special evidence of hatred for her husband, as well as adultery on the part of a young wife, plausibly shown in the film "The Bloody Lady", historians did not come across. In the same way, it remains unknown why the head of the family died after six years of marriage, leaving a 26-year-old widow with two sons in her arms - and a lot of money. Subsequently, versions arose that Saltykova herself got rid of her husband, but they seem to historians to be groundless.
rich widow
After the death of her husband, Daria Saltykova became fabulously rich. The reason was also that her mother (who, unlike the serial version, was not a homicidal maniac at all) and grandmother lived in a monastery and abandoned the family fortune.
So at the age of 26, a young mother of two sons became the sole owner of six hundred peasants in estates near Moscow located on the territory of the current village of Mosrentgen and the metropolitan area of Teply Stan. The town house of Saltychikha in Moscow was located on the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka and Kuznetsky Most. The lady also had remote estates in the Vologda and Kostroma provinces.
The widowed Daria Saltykova, of course, has not lost interest in the opposite sex. There is evidence that she played tricks with her husband's relative Sergei Saltykov. In the TV series "The Bloody Lady" his role was played by Pyotr Rykov. I must say that Sergei subsequently really became one of the favorites of Catherine II. In addition, some historians suggest that he is the biological father of Paul I.
Saltychikha's lover Sergei Saltykov / Pyotr Rykov in the image of Sergei Saltykov in the TV series "The Bloody Lady"
The widow led a secular lifestyle and at the same time was known as very pious - several times a year she made a pilgrimage to shrines, spared no money for church needs. The terrible "fun" of Saltychikha became known only a few years later. In the meantime, returning home after the service, she sat down in a chair in the middle of the courtyard to administer a "righteous judgment" over the serfs.
mysterious passion
According to witnesses, Saltychikha began to show her sadistic inclinations about six months after her husband's death. The film "The Bloody Lady" shows that the first signs of mental illness appeared in the landowner in early childhood - but historians have not found such evidence. However, the director notes that he did not set as his goal to make a historical film, "The Bloody Lady" is rather a scary tale.
Apparently, Daria Saltykova began to “be touched by the mind” precisely after the death of her husband. According to modern psychiatry, she had epileptoid psychopathy - a mental disorder in which a person often experiences bouts of sadism and unmotivated aggression.
Augustine Christian Ritt, "Portrait of Countess Darya Petrovna Saltykova", 1794, another portrait allegedly of Saltychikha
The first complaints about her atrocities, which were far from isolated, date back to 1757. Every year Saltychikha became more and more cruel and sophisticated. According to the stories of the serfs, she whipped them to death - and if she got tired, handed over the whip or whip to assistants - haiduks, pulled out women's hair on their heads or set them on fire, branded the ears of the young with a red-hot iron, scalded them with boiling water, froze to death in the cold or in an icy pond in winter, even buried alive.
"Saltychikha", Pchelin V.N.
In particular, Saltychikha loved to torture and torment the brides who were preparing for the wedding. She put on whole bloody performances, always ending in the death of young girls, cut with a whip. The coachman, the groom and a couple of henchmen, under the strict gaze of the bloody mistress, tried tirelessly. After all, it is well known that your own skin is more expensive. Fear and horror reigned in the noble house: the short night seemed like heaven to the serfs. And each of them with bated breath waited for the morning. And the awakened Saltychikha always gets up on the wrong foot and will definitely find a reason to pull out a tuft of hair from a passing girl or burn her face with a red-hot iron or red-hot tongs.
Alexandra Ursulyak as Saltychikha in the series “Ekaterina. Takeoff"
Once, in September 1761, as a “prelude” to the next execution of her subjects, a boy, Lukyan Mikheev, was beaten to death with a log. Beautiful girls aroused special hatred in Saltychikha. For example, she strove to beat pregnant women in the stomach, doused them with boiling water and pulled out the ears of her victims with red-hot tongs. Sometimes this seemed not enough to her: once Saltychikha ordered the serf Thekla to be buried alive in the ground. A small but revealing touch to the portrait of the killer: all the victims were necessarily buried by the priest of the landowner. What he felt during this rite is unknown ...
Illustration of Kurdyumov's work for the Great Reform encyclopedia, which depicts the torture of Saltychikha "as softly as possible"
Not only peasants suffered from a psychopath
Once a well-known nobleman almost fell under the hot hand of the landowner. Land surveyor Nikolai Tyutchev - the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev - was her lover for a long time, but then decided to marry another. What did you pay for...
Vlad Sokolovsky in the image of Nikolai Tyutchev in the TV series "The Bloody Lady" (real portraits of the land surveyor have not been preserved)
This story took place in early 1762. The landowner had an affair with engineer Nikolai Tyutchev. As a result, the man could not stand the violent temper of Saltychikha and decided to leave. He wooed Pelageya Tyutcheva, she agreed. The young began to think about the wedding, and Saltykova - about the murder.
So, on the night of February 12-13, she bought gunpowder and sulfur and sent the groom Roman Ivanov to set fire to the house of her former lover. She only demanded that the couple be at home and burned alive. The man did not fulfill the order, being afraid to kill the nobleman. For this he was severely beaten. The second time the landowner sent two: Ivanov and a certain Leontiev. However, this time they did not dare, returning to Saltychikha. The men were beaten with batogs, but they did not kill them.
The third time she sent three serfs at once. The Tyutchevs went to the Bryansk district to the estate of the bride Ovstug. Their path lay along the Great Kaluga Road, where an ambush was set up. The serfs had to first shoot at them, and then finish them off with sticks. But someone warned the young people about the ambush, and in the end they escaped at night by a roundabout way.
The Case of the Lost Souls
Complaints rained down on the ferocious landowner, but Saltychikha belonged to a well-known noble family, whose representatives were also governor-generals of Moscow. All cases of cruelty were decided in her favor. Moreover, often the opposite happened - the complainants returned to the estate, where they were beaten with whips and exiled to Siberia.
Only two peasants, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives were brutally killed by Saltychikha, were lucky. In 1762, they managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne, who decided to use the case of a sadist as a show trial. It marked a new era of legality and demonstrated to the entire Moscow nobility the readiness of the authorities to fight abuses on the ground.
Catherine II / Severia Janušauskaite as Catherine II in the TV series "The Bloody Lady"
The investigation into the Saltychikha case lasted six years. It turned out that she tortured and killed at least 38 people. The remaining cases of missing more than a hundred peasants could not be attributed to the landowner. But even this was enough for the Empress to personally sign the verdict for Daria Saltykova. The Senate, which was supposed to pass judgment by law, refused to do so.
The most terrible rumor that was spread about the landowner Saltykova was that she drank the blood of young girls and was a cannibal. This, they say, explained the fact that the bodies or burial places of most of the souls who were considered missing without a trace, during the investigation, which lasted more than five years, could not be found. The whole thing was based on the stories of the serfs.
Shot from the series "The Bloody Lady"
There is a version that the high-profile case of Saltychikha was beneficial to Catherine the Great and her supporters - in order to morally weaken the Saltykovs and prevent even the hypothetical possibility of taking the Russian throne by representatives of the German Welf dynasty, to which three tragically dead Russian emperors belonged (Peter II, Peter III and Ivan VI ) and who was related to the Saltykovs. Therefore, it is quite possible that the story of the crimes of the landowners could inflate.
Unrepentant
Numerous influential relatives of Daria Saltykova, including the governor of Moscow and the field marshal, did their best to avoid the death penalty. Nevertheless, the decision of the Empress was harsh. By her decree, she decided henceforth "to call this monster a man."
In September 1768, Catherine II rewrote the sentence several times. Four of her handwritten drafts of the document have survived. In the final version, Saltychikha was deprived of her noble rank and sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication.
Saltychikha was taken to the square, on the scaffold she was tied with chains to a pillory and the royal paper was read out. And before that, the priest and two helpers of Daria Saltykova were mercilessly flogged by the executioner. After some time, they put her in a black wagon and took her to the St. John the Baptist Convent. Here a “repentant” chamber was waiting for her - almost a pit where even a ray of light did not penetrate. Only in the minutes when food was brought to the prisoner was light allowed - the stub of the candle was placed next to the bowl for the duration of the meal.
Actress Yulia Snigir in the image of Saltychikha in the series "Bloody lady"
After more than a dozen years, Saltychikha was transferred to a stone extension of the cathedral church, where there was a small barred window. There were rumors that Daria Saltykova somehow managed to seduce the soldier guarding the dungeon, and at the age of 50 give birth to a child from him. And, they say, a random lover was subjected to public flogging and sent to a penal company. We note that not once - neither during the investigation, nor at the scaffold - Saltychikha admits his guilt and does not repent. And on her face, frightening even experienced jailers, a calm and triumphant smile will walk.
John the Baptist Convent, where Daria Saltykova was imprisoned
What is surprising - the gas chamber, distinguished by excellent health, lived to be 71 years old. In the last years of her life, the prisoner already behaved like a real crazy woman - she scolded loudly, spat, tried to poke at onlookers with a stick. They buried Daria Saltykova at the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, next to her relatives.
The noble Russian nobility shyly turned a blind eye to the deeds of the followers of Saltychikha. For example, in September 1842, the landowner Vera Sokolova beat the courtyard girl Nastasya to death, and in the Tambov province, the peasants were afraid of the wife of the nobleman Koshkarov like fire. This secular lady, shining at balls, simply adored in her estate to personally whip "rude men" and "stupid women" with a whip. And a certain Saltykova, Saltychikha's namesake, kept the yard hairdresser in a cage for three years in a cage near the bed. However, these are just a few documented cases, how many there were in fact - it's scary to imagine.
You can safely call it a serial killer. It is believed that she was involved in the death of 138 serfs, some of whom she personally killed, others were killed on her orders. The investigation, which lasted as long as 8 years, managed to prove that she was guilty of the death of 38 people from this list, however, even that was more than enough to sentence the noblewoman from a noble family to a public shameful punishment and life imprisonment. There were many rumors about her: it was said that Saltykova bathed in the blood of young girls and ate fried babies.
The Saltychikha case has become, in its way, a landmark for the Russian judicial system. This show trial was supposed to demonstrate to the nobility and the powerful of this world that under the new mother, everything will now be different, and justice, they say, does not understand the ranks. Of course, it was a little farce and a little slyness - the investigation of Saltychikha's crimes got underway solely due to the fact that two peasant peasants miraculously managed to convey their message directly to the empress. Well, and, of course, it was a completely egregious case. or accidentally nailing a serf to the landowners often happened, but knowingly killing a quarter of their souls from the world is not.
Daria Nikolaevna came from an old noble family. Her grandfather, Avton Ivanov, was a Duma clerk and managed to make an impressive fortune - he owned large capital and 16 thousand souls. Young Daria was given out as a representative of an equally glorious and noble family - Gleb Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment. By the way, another representative of the Saltykov branch, Sergei Vasilyevich, was the first favorite of Catherine II (it was even rumored that he was a real father).
In marriage, the Saltykovs managed to give birth to two sons, but soon the husband died. Daria was left a widow at the age of 26. True, the widow is quite rich. After the death of her husband, she became the manager of estates in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces, as well as the owner of a considerable fortune. She had 600 serf souls.
She was an ordinary young woman, very pious, but at the same time quite secular - Daria had many "useful" acquaintances with whom she maintained friendly relations. Saltykova donated a lot of money to the church, but once a year she herself went on a pilgrimage to one or another shrine. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about Saltykova's appearance, and all the canvases that call her portraits actually represent completely different women.
This portrait is usually passed off as an image of Saltychikha, but this is not her. (wikipedia.org)
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
It is not known at what point Saltykova turned from an ordinary landowner into a sophisticated killer. It is only clear that before widowhood these inclinations did not manifest themselves.
Darya was persecuted, with rare exceptions, by young girls. This later led researchers to believe that she may have been a latent homosexual. Shortly before their death, they all, as a rule, entered the service of maids directly in the manor house. The reason for the severe beating and torture was the "negligent" attitude to their duties: poorly washed floors, cold coffee, carelessly made bed.
Saltykova could watch for a long time how the girl washes the floor, and then, if she found the slightest mistake, she whipped the servants with rods or beat them with whatever came to hand - with a rolling pin, a log or just with her fists. This happened to a serf named Katerina Semyonova, whom Saltychikha beat to death with a whip and batogs.
Beating with batogs. (wikipedia.org)
Saltychikha tortured her victims for a long time and with pleasure - the punishment could stretch for a day. If the landowner got tired of striking, she entrusted it to her “attorneys” from the peasants, the so-called “haiduks”, who finished off the victim. Observing the execution of the order, she could "cheer" them with assurances that nothing would happen to them or to her. One of Salytkova's favorite methods of torture was to cauterize the ears of delinquent girls with hot tongs. In addition, she pulled out shreds of hair from them with her bare hands, and once she set fire to the girl’s braids with a candle, and then ordered to finish her off. The body of the unfortunate woman was then taken out in a coffin in the cold, and her newborn child, who froze to death, was placed on her chest. Another girl, on the orders of Saltykova, was driven into a pond, where she had to stand up to her neck in water. It was November outside, and she died a few hours later.
Catherine II, who received a denunciation of "suicide cases"
Despite the fact that it was still 100 years before the abolition of serfdom, the peasants, in general, could complain about the willfulness of the landowner. But that's in theory. In practice, such cases were very rarely considered by the court, and the serfs were accused of slandering the owner and severely punished. Nevertheless, in the five years during which Saltychikha committed atrocities, the serfs made 21 complaints against her. All these stories were “hushed up” - the competent authorities reported the denunciations to the landowner herself, and she paid off with money or asked for help from her all-powerful acquaintances. Thus, Saltychikha considered herself absolutely inviolable. Everything changed the case. Two serfs, Yemelyan Ilyin (one of her “gaiduks”) and Savely Martynov, decided to complain directly to the empress. Ilyin lost three wives, one after another, all of them died under the torture of the landowner. The men decided to escape, and in early June 1762 they arrived in St. Petersburg. It is not known how they managed to find a person who, firstly, had access to the palace, and, secondly, agreed to comply with the request and convey the complaint, but the deed was nevertheless done. By some miracle, the “written assault” was delivered directly to Catherine. The statement said that Martynov and Ilyin were aware of “murderous cases behind their mistress, Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova.” They pointed out that more than 100 people had been killed by it since 1756. The serfs asked Catherine not to extradite them to their mistress, since upon their return they were inevitably threatened with death, and also to protect all her peasants from bullying.
In July 1762, that is, after the complaint reached the Empress, Saltychikha dealt with her last victim. The peasant woman Fekla Gerasimova was severely beaten, and then, still alive, was sent to the village of Troitskoye, where she was to be buried. The headman, who until that moment had unquestioningly carried out the orders of the lady, seeing the condition of the girl, took Gerasimova back to Moscow, but the unfortunate woman died on the way. He brought the corpse to the office of the Moscow civil governor, a doctor was called, who recorded that there were numerous signs of bodily injuries on the woman's body. However, even after that they did not raise a fuss, but ordered the body to be taken back to Troitskoye and buried.
In the meantime, Catherine ordered the matter to be put into motion: from her office, the denunciation went for consideration to the Governing Senate, and then ended up in Moscow, in the justice college. The investigation was entrusted to the court adviser Stepan Volkov, a modest man who did not have high patrons or serious connections. He was given an assistant - the young prince Dmitry Tsitsianov. The two of them managed to unravel this case and pull out into the light of God the truth about the fierce landowner and her entourage - in addition to the murders of serfs, episodes with bribery of high-ranking officials also surfaced.
Volkov and Tsitsianov began by studying Saltykova's account books, and also tried to get her serfs to talk, but they did not succeed immediately. The peasants refused to testify, as they were afraid to anger the mistress. The situation changed when the investigators received permission to take Darya Nikolaevna into custody. In January 1764, she was removed from the management of property and money, and in February they took her under guard. Volkov said that torture would be applied to her. In fact, permission to torture the suspect was not received - Catherine forbade the use of this method, but allowed the possibility of intimidating the arrested. A priest was assigned to Saltykova, who was supposed to persuade her to confess to her deed. However, for a whole month he was not able to convince Daria to speak - she claimed that the servant had slandered her, and did not admit her guilt.
Then the investigators decided to put pressure on her in a different way. On March 4, 1764, Saltykov was taken under escort "for torture." But it wasn't her who was being tortured: in front of the woman's eyes, another man, a certain criminal, was being tortured. Volkov hoped that the demonstrative execution would frighten Daria, and she would finally confess to what she had done. However, the torture did not make any impression on her - Saltykova remained calm throughout the entire process.
Saltychikha. (wikipedia.org)
Then Volkov decided to arrange general searches in the estates of the landowner - in total, about 130 people were interviewed, among whom were the gentry, neighbors, and local priests. Details and details surfaced: the names of those killed, the circumstances under which the crimes were committed, and it also became known to whom and how much Saltykova gave "on the paw" to cover her affairs. The serfs were now more willing to make contact with the investigator, as they knew that their mistress was already being held under arrest.
Volkov and Tsitsianov managed to draw up a list of serfs whose fate was in question. There were 138 of them in total. Some of them were listed as "dead from diseases", others were recorded as absent for an unknown reason, some were considered fugitives. During the investigation, another curious episode also surfaced - an attempted murder of a nobleman. Saltykova for some time was in a love relationship with the engineer Nikolai Tyutchev, the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. He, however, preferred in the end to marry another woman, unable to withstand the violent temper of Darya Nikolaevna. The latter was furious and decided to kill her former lover along with his young wife. She twice sent her peasants with an order to plant a bomb in their house, but they did not dare to do this: for the murder of a nobleman, they were definitely waiting for death. The third time, she sent one of her henchmen to catch Tyutchev on the way out of the house and beat him to death, but the plan failed again: one of the serfs warned the man about the impending attack.
Daria Saltykova - "torturer and murderer"
Finally, in the spring of 1765, the investigation was completed - the decision of the Senate was expected. Saltykova's guilt was unconditional and obvious, but the verdict was in question. The empress herself had to determine the measure of punishment. Catherine rewrote the text of the verdict many times and sent the final version to the Senate only on October 2, 1768. In the document, Saltykova was called "a tormentor and a murderer", "a freak of the human race" and other unflattering words. The landowner was deprived of her noble rank and sentenced to an hour of "reproachful spectacle", during which she had to stand chained to a pole, with a sign "torturer and murderer." Catherine, however, decided not to pass the death sentence, instead, Saltykova had to spend the rest of her life (and she was only 38 years old at the time of the sentencing) in prison, without light and the right to communicate with anyone except the nun and the guard. As a demonstration of a special, personal disgust for the criminal, Catherine ordered that Saltychikha be deprived of the title of “woman” and called the landowner the pronoun “he”.
Saltykova spent 11 years in her dungeon - it was a tiny room on the territory of the monastery. The height of the ceiling was about two meters, but the chamber was below ground level, and therefore the light did not penetrate there. In 1779, she was moved to a stone annex, where conditions were incomparably better - in any case, there was a window. In addition, she was allowed to communicate with the "visitors" - there were many who wanted to look at the fanatic.
There were rumors that she, while in custody, entered into a love affair with one of the guards guarding her and even gave birth to a child from him. But this information did not find any confirmation.
Saltykova lived until 1801, so one can only guess how harsh the conditions of detention actually were. She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, on a plot that she had acquired even before her arrest and imprisonment. Her eldest son, who also died in 1801, was buried with her.
In early February, the serial film “Bloody Lady” was released on television based on the story of the landowner Darya Saltykova, who tortured to death almost one and a half hundred of her peasants. Having established a regime of permanent terror on her estate, even two centuries ago and in the absence of the media, the lady managed to become famous almost throughout the country. the site tells about the cruel noblewoman Saltychikha, who is considered the first Russian maniac.
Daria Saltykova is called the most terrible woman in Russian history
In the already tragic history of Russia, Daria Saltykova left her bloody mark. With her own hands, she killed more than a hundred innocent serfs from the world and mocked them for her own pleasure. Interest in this controversial figure increased after the premiere of the serial film "The Bloody Lady", in which Yuliya Snigir played the role of Saltychikha. There is a lot of fiction in the multi-part film (its creators warn the viewer about this in the very first series). However, in our opinion, the history of the landowner did not need such a thing - it is already full of drama and blood.
Childhood, adolescence, youth
Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova was born in 1730 to the family of the duma clerk Nikolai Ivanov and Anna Davydova, close to Peter II. Her grandfather Avtonom Ivanov, during the Streltsy rebellion, supported the then-future Emperor Peter I, for which, in gratitude, he received from the ruler the post of head of the Local Order, and with it - ranks and estates. He left a good inheritance to his son - Daria and her older sisters Agrafena and Martha grew up in a wealthy family. The dynasty was related to Musin-Pushkin, Davydov, Stroganov, Tolstoy and other eminent nobles. No one then could have thought what the younger Ivanova would become famous for in the future.
The girl was very pious, like her mother. In general, little is known about the first twenty years of the life of the future landowner, because after it became known about the atrocities committed by her, an order came from above to destroy her portraits and any memory of her. The history of Saltychikha is known mainly from the memoirs of contemporaries, as well as from the materials of the investigation of her deeds.
Marriage
Daria had a pleasant appearance and an accommodating (for some time) disposition. She was considered an enviable bride. At nineteen, she was married to a rich captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Saltykov, who was a relative of noble Moscow aristocrats. By the way, his brother Sergei Saltykov was a favorite of Catherine II.
Daria was a beautiful girl, so she easily managed to find a good match
The newlyweds settled in a Moscow estate. Some historians claim that the couple lived in peace and harmony, others are convinced that Gleb, who had a reputation as a ladies' man before the wedding, cheated on his wife right and left. Daria gave birth to sons Fedor and Nikolai. The upbringing of boys, as was customary at that time, was carried out by a huge staff of servants. This allowed their father to travel on official business, and their mother to attend social events, charity events and go on pilgrimages.
After seven years of marriage, Saltykov caught a cold and died of a fever. 26-year-old Daria was very upset by the loss. She abandoned her business and moved from the center of Moscow to the Troitskoye estate near Moscow, which had previously belonged to her father. There she silently mourned her grief. Many historians agree that it was the death of her husband that became the turning point in Saltykova's life. It was after the tragedy that her sadistic inclinations began to manifest.
bloodthirsty monster
After the death of Gleb, Daria received into her full possession of about six hundred peasants on estates located in the Moscow, Vologda, Kostroma provinces, and became more than a wealthy person. Until the death of her husband, the lady did not show cruelty in dealing with people, and soon after she was widowed, rumors about her fierce atrocities spread around the estate.
The fact is that a wealthy widow intended to remarry and looked after herself a new groom, but the gentlemen were in no hurry to ask for her hand. Time passed, personal life did not stick, and the wealthy landowner began uncontrollable bouts of anger and aggression.
Seeing how the yard girls easily find suitors for themselves and create families, Daria began to fall into a rage and, in a fit of uncontrollable rage, caused them injuries of varying severity.
Not only serfs suffered from the dashing temper of the landowner: sometimes neighbors also fell under the hot hand.
The most common reason was the allegedly dishonest performance of household duties - for example, the allegedly poorly washed floor or linen that was not washed, according to the hostess. However, most often, Saltykova’s reasons were not required ... According to eyewitnesses, Daria struck the girls with the first object that came to hand, be it a broom, a rolling pin, a log or a stone. The offender was then flogged by grooms and often raped, sometimes to death.
After the death of her husband, Saltykova began uncontrollable attacks of aggression, and she began to torment peasant women.
Saltychikha, without a twinge of conscience, could pour boiling water over the face of a peasant woman, set fire to her hair on her head, chain her naked in the cold, or starve her. Over time, the torture of the landowner became more and more sophisticated: she tore out the hair of the servants, beat people with their heads against the walls and burned their ears with hot hair tongs ... The cause of death of a person (mostly girls, but later the investigation counted three men) was called some kind of illness , or he was put on the wanted list as an escaped serf.
At first, rumors spread around the surrounding villages about a wicked landowner who beats her serfs to death, and soon carts with a covered cargo of unknown origin began to move. Saltykova's people did not hide from witnesses and explained that it was just another serf who died and he was being taken for examination. Sometimes, however, by opening the fabric, it was possible to see the disfigured corpse. Popular rumor quickly spread such news. Soon people began to slowly report what they saw to higher authorities.
Rumors gradually began to circulate about Daria's atrocities.
There was also a leak of information from the serfs who had fled from Daria, who came to the police in order to show the injuries. Basically, police chiefs sent serfs back, preferring to remain silent about the atrocities of the noblewoman.
Moreover, her hand was generous not only for blows, but also for bribes for police chiefs.
The peasants, who were so happy about the miracle of their freedom, were returned back to the bloodthirsty mistress - this time to certain death.
From love to hate
The neighbor of this temperamental widow was officer Nikolai Tyutchev (grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev), who worked as a land surveyor. According to some reports, their affair with Daria began with a scandal. Once Nikolai, hunting, accidentally wandered into her territory. The dashing landowner ordered her people to immediately seize the insolent man and deliver him to the estate. The officer managed to hush up the conflict, and soon they began a relationship.
During a relationship with Nikolai Tyutchev, Saltychikha stopped torturing the serfs
The lovers arranged dates as soon as they had free time. Daria flourished and even calmed down for a while: for about a year she did not torment her peasants, but then everything returned to normal. Time passed, but for some reason Nikolai was in no hurry to propose to his beloved. It turns out that he heard rumors about her atrocities. Convinced of their veracity, Tyutchev decided to break with Saltykova. Megaera lost her temper and, according to some historians, ordered to catch her lover and put her in a cold barn for several days. He was saved by one of the peasant women, who opened the door for Tyutchev to escape.
A few months later, Nikolai set out to marry another neighbor, Pelageya Panyutina. Saltykova, having heard the news, was so shocked that, in modern terms, she finally "fell off the coils." She decided to kill her former lover, and at the same time his bride. The landowner ordered her groom to build a bomb from two kilograms of gunpowder. To blow up the estate in which Tyutchev and Panyutina lived, they instructed two peasants who, at the very last moment, chickened out and did not comply with the order. Of course, they were brutally flogged. Saltychikha decided to revise the retaliation plan and organized an ambush for the captain's crew, which was heading to Tambov. The serfs, realizing that they would face the death penalty for an attempt on an officer, were afraid again and warned him about the impending attempt. Tyutchev officially notified the authorities of a possible attack and received twelve soldiers as guards. Saltykova, having learned about this, canceled the attempt at the last moment.
After the failed revenge, Daria finally lost touch with reality and, with a vengeance, set about atrocities against the peasants.
Investigation
In the same 1762, two peasants Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov, who fled from Saltykova, whose wives she killed (Ilyin had three in a row), managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne. This was the twenty-second complaint from the people of Darya, but only this one, by some miracle, fell into the hands of the Empress. Perhaps, under Elizabeth Petrovna and Peter II, the paper would have gone unnoticed (nobles had often flogged their peasants before), but the new ruler, who arrived in Russia from enlightened Europe, built a civilized society and did not want atrocities to go unpunished in her state .
Catherine II herself controlled the course of the case of Daria Saltykova
In the complaint of the serfs, it was indicated that their mistress had killed about a hundred souls in six years. Catherine II immediately initiated an investigation. And although Saltychikha belonged to a noble family, the empress decided to make the process indicative.
Investigator Stepan Volkov discovered a lot of interesting things. The interrogator seemed suspicious of the percentage of officially deceased serfs, especially since the death rate among women and girls far exceeded that among men.
The court adviser counted about one hundred and thirty-eight victims, and also found out that the peasants of Darya had already filed complaints against her twenty-one times.
Each of them described in detail the methods of torture that the landowner used on her people. It turned out that Saltychikha had her own prisons with various torture devices.
Daria obstructed justice with might and main, being sure that she would again be able to get out of the water dry thanks to money. By the way, historians say that if another investigator had come across the case of the landowner, perhaps her guilt would not have been proven. Saltykova was removed from the management of the estates. A priest was assigned to her for a month, who was supposed to persuade her to repent before the Lord and confess her crimes. The noblewoman refused to admit her guilt, claiming that she had been slandered by the servants.
After that, Volkov organized a general search on the estates of the villain and interrogated absolutely all the serfs and even neighbors. The facts of countless bullying of the servants, as well as murders, were revealed. The last victim of the mistress was the 19-year-old courtyard girl Fekla Gerasimova, who died in the summer of 1762. In addition, a ledger was discovered, which indicated all the bribes that Daria gave to officials. Two servants, a groom and a housemaid, Aksinya Stepanova, helped her mistress to commit atrocities. The last two served as undertakers.
The court ruled that Saltykova was "undoubtedly guilty" of the death of thirty-eight serfs; she was "left in suspicion" of the death of another twenty-six. The circumstances of the death of another seventy-four peasants remained unclear. By the way, Daria was also found guilty of the attempt on the life of Captain Tyutchev.
Sentence
The investigation went on for about six years. That the court verdict would be guilty, no one doubted, because the evidence was convincing. However, Saltychikha still did not admit to anything. In 1768, Catherine II decided to imprison Daria for life in the dungeon of the Ivanovsky Monastery without light and human communication, as well as to deprive her of her noble title and prohibit her from being called her father's or husband's family, including in court.
Daria stood at the pillory for about an hour (frame from the serial film "The Bloody Lady")
Saltykova had to stand for an hour at the pillory with a shield around her neck with the inscription "torturer and murderer."
By decree of Catherine Saltychikha, not only were they deprived of all rights and all property, but they also decided to continue to "call this monster a man."
The sentence of the condemned landowner was executed on October 17, 1768, on Red Square in Moscow. On the same day, the priest and two servants of the landowner convicted in the Saltykova case were whipped and branded. All three were sent to hard labor in Siberia.
Further fate
Saltykova was actually buried alive. She sat in a dungeon without light, she was not allowed to take walks, receive and send letters. Only on major church holidays Daria was brought to a small window. Eleven years later, the former landowner was transferred to a stone annex with a barred window. Visitors to the Ivanovsky Monastery could even talk to the "murderer". According to one of the historians, at the same time she “cursed, spat and stuck a stick through the bars,<…>thereby revealing her inveterate bestiality, which did not extinguish in her either repentance for villainy, or the languor of long-term imprisonment in a gloomy sepulchre. There is some information according to which Daria, at the age of fifty, gave birth to a child from a security guard. Nevertheless, there are no documents that could shed light on the situation. Saltykova died at the age of seventy-one.
Hollywood chic, which we missed so much! At the Vanity Fair party, actresses and models as fragile as figurines, as well as blooming Lewinsky and feminine Jenner, were pleasing to the eye.
Daria Saltykova, or as the people called her Saltychikha, entered the history of the country as the “Bloody Lady”. She became famous as a real sadist who did not spare the life and health of her serfs, mocking people for her own pleasure.
The real story of Saltychikha was very interested in society thanks to the historical series, which was shown by the Russia-1 TV channel. However, the story of the "Bloody Lady" on the screen looks rather mild compared to what actually happened in the life of a famous woman.
The creators of the series tried to convey in an artistic way the suffering of a woman who could not cope with her own outbursts of rage and explained the cruelty of a noblewoman with a misfortune in her personal life. However, how it actually happened is not completely known, since all they tried to destroy existing documents and even her portraits, considering her "a disgrace to the human race."
The true story of Satychikha - who is she and when did she live
Daria Saltykova was born on March 11 (22), 1730 in Moscow, and the “bloody lady” died on November 27 (December 9), 1801. Her father was a pillar nobleman Nikolai Avtonomovich Ivanov, her mother was Anna Ivanovna (nee Davydova). Grandfather - Avton Ivanov - was a major figure in the times of Princess Sophia and Peter I.
Daria received a good education at home, spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments. Since she grew up in a pious family, she herself was distinguished by piety in her youth.
Daria married the captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov (died around 1755) and bore him two sons: Fedor (01/19/1750 - 06/25/1801) and Nikolai (d. 07/27/1775), who immediately after birth were enlisted in the Guards.
At the age of 26, Saltychikha became a widow.
It is known that during the life of her husband, Daria did not notice a particular tendency to assault. She was a blooming, beautiful and at the same time a very pious woman. That is, it can be suspected that Daria Saltykova's mental illness was associated with the early loss of her husband.
The rich landowner entered the history of the Russian state as one of the most cruel housewives.
Saltykova brutally beat her servants, beat them to death and tortured them for the slightest infractions, and sometimes for no apparent reason. Mostly young girls and married women became victims of Saltychikha, which once again indicates that Saltykova really went crazy after the death of her husband.
According to official data, fifty people became victims of the atrocities of the landowner, and according to unofficial data, she managed to torture more than a hundred serfs.
As a rule, it all began with claims to the servants. The lady might not like how the floor was washed or the linen was washed. For this, the angry mistress began to beat the negligent maid, mostly with a log, but in the absence of such, an iron, a rolling pin, that is, everything that was at hand, was used.
Initially, the serfs of Darya Saltykova were not very worried about the behavior of the lady, since this kind of thing happened everywhere. The first murders did not frighten them either.
But since 1757, the killings have become systematic. The victims of torture were subsequently killed and buried, and some disease was called the official cause of death of a person, or he was put on the wanted list as an escaped serf.
In the end, the servants could not stand such treatment and denounced the landowner to Empress Catherine II herself. She listened to the words of the serfs and ordered an investigation.
The investigation lasted more than 6 years. Catherine personally checked all the documents and could not believe that her noblewoman was capable of such acts.
The empress personally chose the punishment for the mistress. She did not dare to publicly execute a respected person, but she could not forgive the deeds of the widow either. Daria Saltykova was chained for an hour to a pillory with a sign "The Murderer". She was also deprived of all noble titles and was even forbidden to be called a woman because of her cruelty towards people.
After that, Saltykova was sent to a monastery, where she was imprisoned in an underground cell. She did not see daylight at all, and she was allowed to light a candle very rarely. Saltykova spent 11 years underground, after which she was transferred to a cell above ground. It is noteworthy that people were allowed to visit Saltychikha, but neither sons nor friends came to her.
Daria Saltykova spent more than 30 years in prison. She died at the age of 71, never repenting of her actions.