In contact with
classmates
The deeds of Daria Saltykova, who is better known as Saltychikha, are striking in their rigidity. Over the course of 5 years, she brutally killed more than 100 serfs and almost sent the grandfather of the great Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev to the next world.
ABOUT Russian Empire in our time, usually, they prefer to remember only the front side of the "Russia that we have lost."
“Balls, beauties, lackeys, junkers…” waltzes and the notorious crunch of French bread, no doubt, all this was. But this bread crunch, pleasant to the ear, was also accompanied by the crunch of the bones of Russian serfs, who created this whole idyll with their labor.
And it's not just about back-breaking work - the serfs, who were in the complete power of the landlords, quite often turned out to be victims of tyranny, bullying, and violence.
The rape of the yard girls by the gentlemen, of course, was not a crime. The master wanted - the master took, that's the whole story.
Of course, there were also murders. Well, the master got excited in anger, beat the disobedient servant, and he take it, give up his breath - who pays attention to this.
But even against the backdrop of the realities of the 18th century, the story of the landowner Daria Saltykova, better known as Saltychikha, looked terrible. To such an extent it is terrible that it came to trial and sentence.
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 well-known statesman of the era of Peter the Great and left a rich legacy to his descendants.
In her youth, a girl from a prominent noble family was known as the first beauty, and besides this, she stood out for her unprecedented piety.
Daria joined her life with the captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov and married him. The Saltykov family was even more famous than the Ivanov family - Gleb Saltykov's nephew Nikolai Saltykov would become the Most Serene Prince, Field Marshal and be a prominent courtier during the time of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I.
The life of the Saltykov spouses did not stand out in any way relative to the lives of other well-born families of that period. Daria gave birth to a wife of 2 sons - Fedor and Nikolai, who, as it was then expected, were immediately enrolled in the Guards regiments from birth.
The life of the landowner Saltykova changed when her husband died. She turned out to be a widow at the age of 26, becoming the owner of a large fortune. She was the owner of the estate in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces. Darya Saltykova had about 600 souls of serfs at her disposal.
The large town house of Saltychikha in Moscow was located in the area of Bolshaya Lubyanka and the Kuznetsk bridge. In addition, Daria Saltykova was the owner of the large Krasnoye estate on the banks of the Pakhra River. Another estate, the one where most of the murders would be committed, was located near the current Moscow Ring Road, where the village of Mosrentgen is currently located.
Until the history of her bloody deeds became known, Daria Saltykova was considered not just a high-born noblewoman, but a very respected member of society. She was respected for her piety, for her constant pilgrimage to shrines, she actively donated funds for church needs, and also distributed alms.
When the investigation into the Saltychikha case began, witnesses noted that during the life of her husband, Daria did not have a penchant for assault. Left without a husband, the landowner changed a lot.
Usually, it all started with complaints about the servants - Daria was unhappy with how the floor was washed or the clothes were washed. The enraged hostess began to beat the disobedient maid, and her favorite weapon was a log. In the absence of such, an iron was used, a rolling pin - everything that was at hand.
At first, the serfs of Darya Saltykova were not very worried about this - such things happened everywhere. The first murders did not scare either - it happens that the lady got excited.
However, from 1757, the killings began to occur systematically. In addition, they have become particularly cruel, sadistic. The lady clearly began to enjoy what was happening.
A real “conveyor of death” worked in Saltychikha’s house - when the hostess was exhausted, further torture of the victim was entrusted to especially close servants - “haiduks”. The groom and the yard girl were entrusted with the procedure for getting rid of the body of the deceased.
The main victims of Saltychikha were the girls who served her, but sometimes reprisals were also committed against men.
Most of the victims after the brutal beating by the mistress of the house were simply spotted to death in the stable. At the same time, Saltychikha was personally at the massacre, enjoying what was happening.
For some reason, many people think that these brutal reprisals the landowner repaired in old age. In reality, Daria Saltykova was outrageous at the age of 27 to 32 - even for that time she was a very young woman.
By nature, Daria was quite strong - when the investigation began, the investigators almost did not find hair on their heads from the women who died from her hands. It turned out that Saltychikha simply pulled them out with her bare hands.
Killing the peasant woman Larionova, Saltychikha burned her hair on her head with a candle. When the woman was killed, the accomplices of the mistress put the coffin with the corpse in the cold, and a living baby of the deceased was placed on the body. The baby died from the cold.
In the month of November, the peasant woman Petrova was driven into a pond with a stick and kept standing in water up to her throat for a couple of hours, until the unfortunate woman died.
Saltychikha's other amusement was dragging her victims by the ears around the house with hot curling irons.
Among the victims of the landowner were several girls who planned to get married soon, pregnant women, 2 girls aged 12 years.
The serfs tried to send complaints to the authorities - from 1757 to 1762, 21 complaints were filed against Daria Saltykova. But thanks to her connections, as well as bribes, Saltychikha not only escaped punishment, but also ensured that the complainants themselves went to hard labor.
The last victim of Daria Saltykova in 1762 was a young girl Fyokla Gerasimova. After being beaten and having her hair pulled out, she was buried alive in the ground.
Talk about the atrocities of Saltychikha began even before the investigation began. In Moscow, it was said that she roasts and eats babies, drinks the blood of young girls. This, however, in reality was not, but what was, was more than enough.
It is sometimes said that a young woman went mad because of the absence of a man. This is true. Men, despite her piety, she had.
For a long time, the landowner Saltykova had an affair with the land surveyor Nikolai Tyutchev, the grandfather of the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. However, Tyutchev preferred another, and the enraged Saltychikha ordered her faithful assistants to kill the ex-lover. There was a plan to blow it up with a homemade bomb in the house of a young wife. But he failed - the performers simply got scared. Killing ordinary people is all right, but for the massacre of a nobleman, rearing and quartering cannot be avoided.
Saltychikha prepared another plan, which involved an ambush attack on Tyutchev and his young wife. However, one of the alleged perpetrators notified Tyutchev of the impending attack in an anonymous letter, and the poet's grandfather escaped death.
Perhaps the deeds of Saltychikha would have remained a secret if, in 1762, two serfs, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, had not broken through with a petition to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne.
They had nothing to lose - their spouses died at the hands of Saltychikha. The story of Yermolai Ilyin is completely terrible: the landowner killed 3 of his spouses in turn. In 1759, the first wife, Katerina Semyonova, was beaten with batogs. In the spring of 1761, her second wife, Fedosya Artamonova, repeated her fate. In February 1762, Saltychikha killed Yermolai's third wife, the quiet and meek Aksinya Yakovleva, to death with a log.
The Empress did not particularly want to quarrel with the nobility because of the mob. But the scale and cruelty of the crimes of Daria Saltykova made Catherine II think. She decided to arrange a show trial.
The investigation progressed rather slowly. High-ranking relatives of Saltychikha thought that the empress's interest in the case would disappear and it could be hushed up. Bribes were offered to investigators, and they interfered in the collection of evidence by any means.
Daria Saltykova herself did not admit to what she had done and did not repent, even when she was threatened with torture. True, they did not apply them to a well-born noblewoman.
Despite this, the investigation found that in the period from 1757 to 1762, 138 serfs died under suspicious circumstances at the landowner Darya Saltykova, of which 50 were officially considered “dead from diseases”, 72 people disappeared without a trace, 16 were considered “left to their spouse” or “gone on the run."
Investigators were able to collect evidence to accuse Daria Saltykova of killing 75 people.
The Moscow Justice College said that in 11 cases the serfs slandered Daria Saltykova. Of the remaining 64 homicides, 26 cases were labeled "keep in suspicion" - that is, it was considered that there was little evidence.
Despite this, 38 brutal murders committed by Daria Saltykova were fully proven.
The case of Saltychikha was sent to the Senate, which ruled on the guilt of the landowner. But the senators did not make a decision on punishment, leaving it to Catherine II.
The archive of the Empress contains 8 drafts of the verdict - Catherine for a long time could not figure out how to punish a non-human in a female guise, who is also a well-born noblewoman.
The verdict was approved on October 2 (October 13, according to the new style), 1768. In expressions, the Empress called everything by its proper name - Catherine called Daria Saltykova "an inhuman widow", "a freak of the human race", "a completely apostate soul", "a tormentor and a murderer".
Saltychikha was sentenced to deprivation of the title of nobility and a life ban on being named after her father or spouse. Also, the landowner was sentenced to one hour of a special "reproachful spectacle" - she stood chained to a pole on the scaffold, and above her head was the inscription: "Tormentor and murderer." Later, she was sent to a monastery for life, where she was to be in an underground chamber where no light enters, and with a ban on communication with people, in addition to the guard and the nun-guard.
Daria Saltykova's "repentance chamber" was an underground room a little more than 2 meters high, the light into which did not penetrate at all. The only thing that was possible was to light a candle during the meal. The prisoner was forbidden to walk, she was taken out of the dungeon only along large church holidays to the small window of the temple so that she could hear bell ringing and watch the service from afar.
The regime was softened after 11 years of imprisonment - Saltychikha was transferred to a stone annex of the temple, in which there was a small window and a lattice. Visitors to the monastery were allowed not only to look at the convict, but also to communicate with her. They went to look at the landowner as if she were a strange animal.
Daria Saltykova actually had excellent health. There is a legend that after 11 years underground, she had an affair with a security guard and even gave birth to a child from him.
Saltychikha died on November 27, 1801 at the age of 72, having spent more than 30 years in prison. There is not a single evidence that the landowner repented of her deed.
Modern criminologists and historians admit that Saltychikha had a mental disorder - epileptoid psychopathy. Some people are even sure that she was a latent homosexual.
To date, it is not possible to know for sure. The story of Saltychikha became unique due to the fact that the case of the deeds of this landowner ended with the punishment of the criminal. The names of some of the victims of Daria Saltykova are known to us, in contrast to the names of millions of people who were tortured to death by Russian landowners during the period of the serfdom in the Russian Federation.
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 the verdict on the villain, which she personally rewrote several times, even avoided calling this woman - monster "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 long time was 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 out to shoot 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 girl passing by 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 encyclopedic edition " Great Reform", which depicts the torture of Saltychikha "if possible in soft colors"
Not only peasants suffered from a psychopath
Under hot hand landowners once nearly hit a famous nobleman. 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. In the end, the man couldn't resist. violent temper 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 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 last years In 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, the landowner Vera Sokolova in September 1842 beat the yard 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.
Name: Daria Saltykova (Saltychikha) Daria Saltykova
Date of Birth: 1730
Age: 71 years old
Place of Birth: the Russian Empire
A place of death: Moscow
Activity: Russian landowner
Family status: Was married
Daria Saltykova - Biography
The investigators working on the case of Darya Saltykova seriously checked the rumors that the landowner ate her victims, and one of her favorite treats was female breasts. The rumors were not confirmed - Saltychikha liked the process of torture itself.
Saltychikha is a terrible fairy tale of Russian history. The name of the landowner, who tortured and killed her serfs, has not been forgotten to this day, although the details of the bloody deeds in her biography have already been erased from people's memory.
Residents of Teply Stan and the village of Mosrentgen located on the other side of the ring road do not even realize that a villainous lady, Saltychikha, committed atrocities here two and a half centuries ago.
Why did an ordinary noble girl Daria Saltykova become a monster in human form? What made her one of the most notorious mass murderers in history? The plump investigation file of Saltychikha, stored in the Russian Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, does not provide answers to these questions. The actions in her biography cannot be explained even by bad heredity: Daria's ancestors were completely normal people.
Grandfather, Duma clerk Avtomon Ivanov, under Peter the Great headed the Local Order. During the Streltsy rebellion, he took the side of the young king at the right time, for which he was awarded ranks and estates. His son Nikolai, having served for several years in the tsarist fleet, returned to his native suburbs, where he rebuilt manor house in the village of Trinity. In the year of Peter's death, he married Anna Tyutcheva - her parents' estate was in the neighborhood. Nikolai and Anna had three daughters - Agrafena, Martha and Daria. Shortly after the birth of the youngest - Daria was born in March 1730 - Anna Ivanovna died.
The Ivanovs did not belong to those landowners who enthusiastically listened to the ideas of the European Enlightenment. In their house, everything was arranged in the old way: long sleep, plentiful food and boredom. Daughters were not taught literacy, but they taught what the future mistress needs - to run a house and keep slaves in strictness.
Many gentlemen just like that, in the old fashioned way, called the serfs, who, according to the law, were considered the full property of the owner. In the end, even noble nobles signed petitions to the tsar "Your Majesty's servant" - what can we say about the peasants? In those years, Empress Anna Ioannovna and her favorite Biron could beat any nobleman with batogs, “truncate” the tongue and send them to Siberia. Russian life in the 18th century was saturated with cruelty, to which Daria had become accustomed since childhood.
According to custom, daughters were married off early. At the age of 19, it was Daria's turn - she became the wife of 35-year-old captain Gleb Saltykov, a descendant of a rich and noble family. Thanks to this marriage, Daria got possessions in the Vologda and Kostroma provinces, as well as a house in Moscow, on the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Bolshaya Lubyanka. A year later, in 1750, she gave birth to a son, Fedor, and two years later, Nikolai. Daria did little with children, leaving them in the care of nurses and nannies. My husband spent almost all his time in the service and often traveled to St. Petersburg with errands. During one of these trips, he caught a cold and died in the spring of 1756.
After that, Daria almost completely abandoned the city house and returned to the Moscow region. By that time, her father had also died, leaving his beloved youngest daughter Troitskoye and the neighboring village of Teply Stan - once there was an inn where the coachmen warmed themselves with tea or something stronger. About five hundred peasants lived in both villages - mostly women and children, since half of the men were taken to the unequal war with Prussia.
What Daria Saltykova, 26, young in modern times, looked like, we don’t know for sure. One source describes her as "a small, bony and pale person", others write about "a woman of heroic build with a masculine voice." However, everyone mentions her hot and ardent disposition. Languishing without male love, after a year of widowhood, she found a replacement for her late husband. According to legend, one fine day she heard shots in the forest and ordered the haiduks (that is, servants) to catch the impudent violator of the border of her possessions.
Soon a handsome young man in simple clothes was brought to her. Mistaking him for a peasant, Darya habitually ordered to give him whips, but he knocked the nearest haiduk to the floor with a blow of his fist and shouted: “How dare you? I am Captain Nikolai Tyutchev!” Learning that a distant relative of her mother drove into her forest by mistake, carried away by hunting, Saltychikha relented and invited the uninvited guest to the table. And soon he was in her bed.
This "neighborly" romance lasted more than one year. Tyutchev was five years younger than Saltykova, but still tired of her violent temperament. In addition, he was a nobleman of a new formation, received a good education and felt uncomfortable next to a rude and illiterate cohabitant - there was nothing to talk about with her. Therefore, he visited Troitskoye no more than once or twice a week, saying that he was busy at work - he worked in the Land Survey Department. During these short visits, he could not fail to notice with what fear the servants looked at their mistress. Although, of course, Daria hid the worst thing from “light-Nikolenka” - she was afraid that she would leave.
And there was enough scary stuff in the estate. In those same years, marked by love for Tyutchev, Daria Saltykova passed away dozens of her peasants. Almost all of them were young women - only two men and five girls aged 11-15 were among the victims. The landowner punished her serfs not for crimes or any serious offenses. It was quite enough for a peasant woman not to wash the floors in the estate very cleanly or to wash the mistress's dresses badly.
Saltykova beat the unfortunate with everything that came to hand - a rolling pin, logs, even a hot iron. The screams and pleas of the victims made the sadist wildly excited. Tired, she called haiduks who beat the women themselves or forced the husbands of the peasant women to do it - if they refused, the same fate awaited them. Saltychikha watched the execution from her chair, shouting: “Stronger, stronger! Beat to death!” Often obedient servants carried out this order. Then the dead women were transferred to the basement, and at night they were buried at the edge of the forest. A paper about the “escape” of another peasant woman was sent to the Treasury. To avoid unnecessary questions, a five-ruble bill was usually attached to this document.
But more often it happened otherwise - after the torture, the victim remained alive. Then she was again forced to wash the floors, although she could hardly stand on her feet. Then with a cry: “Oh, you rubbish, you decided to be lazy!” - Saltychikha again took up "admonition". Women were exposed naked in the cold, starved, tore the body with red-hot tongs. These scenes were repeated over and over again - the tormentor's fantasy was rather meager.
She beat the peasant woman Agrafena Agafonova with a rolling pin, and the grooms - "with sticks and batozh, which is why her arms and legs were broken." Akulina Maksimova, after being beaten “without any mercy with a rolling pin and a roll on the head,” the lady burned her hair with a candle. She “taught” the 11-year-old daughter of the courtyard Antonov Elena with the same rolling pin, and then pushed her off the stone porch of the estate.
Similar scenes took place in the Moscow home of Saltychikha, next to the fashionable shops of Kuznetsky Most. The maid Praskovya Larionova died there - at first the sadist beat her herself, and then gave her to the haiduks, shouting: “Beat her to death! I myself am responsible and I am not afraid of anyone! Praskovya, beaten to death, was taken to Troitskoye, leaving her baby in a sleigh, who froze to death on the way. Katerina Ivanova was taken along the same road, whose groom Davyd "saw swollen legs from the battle and blood flowed from the seat."
Over the years, Saltychikha became more inventive and used, as the investigation noted, "torture, unknown to Christians." For example, “with burning tongs, they pulled on the ears and doused the head with hot water from the kettle.” And the peasant woman Marya Petrova was herded into a pond in November, where they kept her neck-deep in ice-cold water for a quarter of an hour, and then beat her to death. Her corpse looked so terrible that even the Trinity priest refused to bury her. Then the body, according to a long-standing habit, was buried in the forest.
More often, such problems did not arise: the dying victim was taken to the “back chamber” and soldered with wine so that during her dying confession she had the strength to mutter at least something. If this did not happen, she was confessed “in a deaf way” and buried in the village cemetery. This happened to the groom's wife, Stepanida, who, on the orders of Saltychikha, was beaten by her own husband with rods - the thick ends of rods. At the funeral, the groom stood under the supervision of the haiduks - so that he would not run to inform. True, such denunciations did not lead to anything - the noble surname of her husband and generous gifts to the authorities reliably protected Saltychikha. Complainers were put in a punishment cell, and then returned to the mistress so that she could get even with them.
At times, Saltychikha, who was dispersed, staged real mass executions. In October 1762, already under investigation, she ordered servants to beat four girls, including 12-year-old Praskovya Nikitina, again for unclean floor washing. As a result, Fekla Gerasimova was barely alive: “her hair was torn out, and her head was broken, and her back was rotten from beatings.” She, along with the others, was thrown in one shirt in the garden, and then dragged into the house and continued beating. As a result, three of the four victims died. Occasionally, Saltychikha also killed men. In April 1761, the headman Grigoriev did not guard the gaiduk Ivanov, who was placed under his supervision, who was guilty of something. The negligent jailer was brought to Troitskoye and handed over to the grooms, who alternately beat him with fists and whips. By morning the elder had died.
Grooms and haiduks were constant executioners of Saltychikha, and they had to kill their loved ones as well. One of them, Yermolai Ilyin, at the whim of the landowner, beat three of his wives to death - one after the other. During the investigation, he testified that “by order of the landowner, he beat many girls and wives taken from different villages into the yard, who soon died from those beatings ...” this landowner, and moreover, that the former informers were punished with a whip; then if he, Ilyin, began to inform, he would also be tortured or even sent into exile. last wife Fedosya Artamonov was finished off with a rolling pin by the mistress herself, who forced her husband to bury her, warning: "Although you will go to the denunciation, you will not find anything."
But this time, Saltychikha's confidence in his permissiveness did not materialize. The groom Yermolai nevertheless went "in denunciation", taking in the company of another serf Saveliy Martynov. They chose a good moment - July 1762, when Catherine II had just ascended the throne. The new queen, who overthrew her husband Peter III, wanted to appear before Russia and the whole world as the protector of her subjects. The case of Saltychikha turned out to be very opportune - the complaint of the peasants was transferred to the Justice Collegium, and it began an investigation.
Another event coincided with this - Saltykova's break with her lover Tyutchev. Tired of the difficult nature of his girlfriend, the young officer announced before Lent that he was going to marry the daughter of a Bryansk landowner, Pelageya Panyutina. Saltychikha was furious - on her orders, the treacherous Tyutchev was locked in a barn, but one of the yard girls helped him escape. In May, she and Panyutina got married and settled in Moscow, on Prechistenka. But Saltychikha did not calm down - on her orders, the groom Aleksey Savelyev bought five pounds of gunpowder at the artillery warehouse in order to blow up the house of the young spouses with it. At the decisive moment, the groom lost his temper and announced that the gunpowder was damp and did not explode.
A month later, Saltychikha found out that the newlyweds would go to the Bryansk province past Teply Stan, and set up an ambush on the road. She was unlucky again - one of the guides, who had previously been friends with Tyutchev, warned him, and he canceled the trip. After that, the landowner left the former lover alone, but he seemed to be seriously frightened, and therefore refused to testify against her. The investigation was already moving forward with difficulty: Saltychikha herself denied all the accusations, and the court could not take into account the complaints of the peasants. But Catherine, who personally kept the matter under control, was determined to see it through to the end. At the end of 1763, the College of Justice proposed that Saltykov be subjected to torture "in the search for truth."
However, the empress decided that torture was not European. She decided to assign to Saltychikha “a skillful priest for a month who would exhort her to confess, and if from this she still does not feel remorse in her conscience, then so that he prepares her for the inevitable torture, and then show her the cruelty of the search for a criminal sentenced to that ". In other words, the criminal was taken to the dungeons and shown how others were being tortured. But she remained silent. The priest's exhortations did not help: four months later he announced that "this lady is mired in sin" and it is impossible to get repentance from her.
In May 1764, a criminal case was opened against Daria Saltykova. She was placed under House arrest, and investigators sent from the capital began to search not only the estate, but all of Troitskoye. Only then the peasants grew bolder and showed the authorities the "rear chamber", where traces of blood were still visible on the floor, and the pond in which women were frozen, and fresh graves in the forest.
Old cases about Saltykova, closed for bribes, were raised in the archives. In April 1768, the Justice College issued a verdict, according to which Saltychikha "inhumanely, painfully killed a considerable number of her male and female people to death."
She was found guilty of 38 murders, although the actual number of victims ranged from 64 to 79 people. Later, a much larger number - 139 killed - came from somewhere, which is still repeated by many authors. Encyclopedias prefer a more cautious estimate - "more than 100 people". The true number of victims, apparently, no one will know. On the one hand, a large part of the missing serfs could really go on the run, so as not to become victims of Saltychikha. On the other hand, some of the dead could go unnoticed: it is unlikely that the authorities showed great zeal in counting the killed peasants.
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 the Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathory tortured almost 300 people in the 17th century. In the latter case, the coincidence is almost literal - the countess also took up atrocities after the death of her husband, and her victims were also mostly women and girls. True, she, according to rumors, bathed in their blood, wanting to preserve her beauty, and in addition made sacrifices to the devil. Everything was different with Saltychikha - every Sunday she went to church and zealously atoned for sins.
The Senate demanded the death penalty for the criminal. But she was still a noblewoman, so Catherine II, by decree of June 12, 1768, ordered to save her life, depriving her of all property, family surname, maternal rights and even gender - it was ordered "to continue to call this monster a man." The decree of the empress said: “This freak of the human race could not inflict that great murder on his own servants with one first movement of rage, but it must be assumed that she, especially in front of many other murderers in the world, has a completely apostate and extremely tormenting soul.”
In other words, the killings were not carried out out of rage, but out of a natural propensity for violence. The word "sadism" was not yet known then, and the Marquis de Sade himself, as they say, walked under the table on foot. However, the Trinity lady was a classic sadist. However, the torture and murder of serfs were a common occurrence in Russia at that time (albeit not on such a scale), and the Saltykova case did not cause either horror or much surprise in society.
On November 17, 1768, Saltychikha was subjected to "civil execution" - they were placed on Red Square in a pillory with a sign "tormentor and murderer" on his chest. The punishment lasted only an hour, after which the former landowner was taken to the Ivanovo Monastery on Solyanka and put in a semi-basement dungeon. Food was served to her through a barred window without opening the door. Once a day, she was taken out of the cell so that she could listen to the divine service in the temple - but outside, without going inside. The serf haiduks, who participated in the beatings and murders, and the priest, who “deafly” confessed the victims of Saltychikha, also had a hard time - they were beaten with a whip, their nostrils were torn out and exiled to Nerchinsk for eternal penal servitude.
Surprisingly, the criminal did not lose heart. She decided that the punishment would be mitigated if she gave birth to a child, and set to work. In 1778, she managed, if not to seduce, then to pity the guard soldier, and she became pregnant. But "mother" Catherine, in the right cases, knew how to show firmness. Saltychikha was not pardoned, but only transferred from the basement to a stone annex with a window. The child she gave birth to was sent to an orphanage, and the traces of the compassionate soldier were lost in Siberia.
Saltykova's calculation did not materialize - on the contrary, her punishment became even more painful. The monastery was besieged by crowds of onlookers who looked into the prisoner's window and mocked her. In response, she scolded last words and tried to get the daredevils with a stick. Eyewitnesses recall that at that time she was ugly fat and dirty, with disheveled hair and "a face as pale as sourdough."
Meanwhile, Saltychikha's estate went to her brother-in-law Ivan Tyutchev. Soon he sold it to a distant relative - the same Nikolai Tyutchev, whose estate, it seems, woke up not only terrible memories. He built a new house in Troitskoye, laid out a park and equipped a pond with swans. Today, there is no trace of all this - only an abandoned church has survived, where the victims of Saltychikha were once buried.
Nikolai Andreevich died in 1797, and twenty years later his grandson, the famous poet Fyodor Tyutchev, came to Troitskoye. He liked the estate - together with the tutor Amfiteatrov, they "left the house, stocking up on Horace or Virgil, and, sitting in a grove, drowned in the pure delights of the beauties of poetry." As for Saltychikha's own children, Fedor died childless, and Nikolai, who died early, left a son who also did not live long. Thus, the Ivanov family was cut short.
Daria Saltykova no longer cared about this. She grew old in her cage room, accustomed to the unbreakable routine and no longer striving to change it. In recent years, her legs were swollen, and she could no longer go to church.
In November 1801, when the prisoner did not get out of bed all day and did not take food, the monks entered the cell and found her dead. She was 71 years old, of which she spent almost half in captivity. There was no cemetery in the Ivanovsky Monastery, and Saltychikha was buried in the Donskoy Monastery. Her tombstone has survived to this day, and the chamber, along with the monastery, burned down during the Great Fire of 1812. The same fate befell the Moscow house of the Saltykovs - today in its place is Vorovsky Square.
They tried to forget about the atrocities in the biography of the Trinity lady as soon as possible. In this story, everything was disgusting - the ferocity of Saltychikha herself, and the slavish obedience of her victims, and the long inaction of the authorities. It did not inspire writers, did not give rise to sonorous legends, like the story of Gilles de Rais or Count Dracula. Only terrible tales about the mistress-tormentor remained, in the reality of which even those who told them did not really believe.
In June 1762, Empress Catherine II received a complaint from two serfs, which reported that the landowner Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova "tortured to death" more than a hundred souls of serfs. The investigation into the case of the landowner Saltykova lasted about three years. Catherine herself passed the verdict on Saltychikha and her accomplices, since none of the judges dared to take responsibility for deciding the fate of the eminent noblewoman.
Dossier on the defendant
Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova was born in March 1730 in a family of high-ranking Moscow nobles. Relatives of her parents were the Davydovs, Musins-Pushkins, Stroganovs, Tolstoys and other eminent nobles.
As a girl, Daria Nikolaevna bore the surname Ivanova. Later, she married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, they had two sons. In her youth, the future sophisticated sadist was an extremely beautiful and at the same time a pious woman. She was widowed in 1756.
At twenty-six, she received a fabulous fortune, previously owned by her mother, grandmother and husband. Daria Saltykova was the owner of estates located in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces.
She generously donated money for church needs and distributed alms, in addition, every year she went on a pilgrimage to some shrine. Saltychikha had about 600 serfs at her disposal, 138 of them were tortured to death. The list of Saltykova's victims included mostly women.
Serfs Saltykova in the period from 1756 to 1762. filed twenty-one complaints against their mistress. All complaints filed were checked, but Daria Nikolaevna was a woman with great connections in the right circles, so the fate of the complaining serfs was predetermined from the very beginning. As soon as Saltykova heard rumors that one of her peasants was denunciating, she immediately took "educational measures" against the disobedient.
Saltykova's punishment was terrible: she beat some to death, sent others to hard labor. It was thanks to her connections that the cruel landowner could escape punishment every time. None of the twenty-one complaints against the landowner Saltykova reached the Empress.
Lucky case
On October 1, 1762, the criminal case of the landowner Saltykova was accepted for consideration by the Moscow Justice Collegium. This was facilitated by a complaint personally handed over to the Empress from two fugitive serfs, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin.
At the end of April 1762, the peasants Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin decided on a desperate step - the serfs set out to personally convey the complaint to the empress, they both lost their wives through the fault of Saltychikha. Catherine received a statement from the peasants in the first half of June of that year, in which the serfs Ilyin and Martynov asked the Empress Mother to intercede for the peasants under the rule of Saltykova.
At the end of the "written assault" the peasants begged the mother empress not to extradite them to the landowner. Catherine took pity on the serfs, on October 1, 1762, the case was accepted for consideration in the Moscow Justice College. The leadership of the investigation was entrusted to an official of humble origin, who has no family or business ties - Stepan Volkov. For higher-ranking officials, investigating a case was a dangerous undertaking. Especially when you consider that, on the one hand, Saltychikha in Moscow had very serious family ties, on the other hand, the empress herself was acquainted with the complaint, which meant that at least some result had to be presented to St. Petersburg. Volkov was subordinate to the young prince Dmitry Tsitsianov, who had the rank of court adviser.
Consequence
Only in November 1763 was it possible to establish that most of the serfs of the landowner did not die a natural death. This secret was revealed to the investigation thanks to the entries in the arrested account books of Saltykova. It was from them that it was possible to determine the number of dead peasants and establish the circle of influential persons involved in the landowner's case.
From these records, it immediately became clear that most of the peasants died a violent death and under strange circumstances.
So, on several occasions, girls of twenty years old, who died in two weeks, acted as maids to the landowner. In 1759, the body of serf Saltykova Khrisanf Andreev was presented to the Investigative Order of Moscow with numerous bodily injuries. The investigation into the circumstances of the death of the peasant took place with gross violations in the preparation of documents.
Based on the documents of the landowner, the most suspicious were the deaths of the three wives of Yermolai Ilyin, the same serf who denounced his mistress. According to entries in Saltykova's house books, many of the peasants were released to patrimonial villages, but they all died upon arrival or went missing. According to investigators, 138 peasants became victims of Saltykova.
Checking the archives of several offices, including the offices of the chief of police, the governor and other important persons of the Moscow province, showed that in the period 1756-62. 21 complaints were filed against Darya Saltykova by her serfs. All complaints cited examples of beatings that resulted in several deaths. All those who denounced were either sent into exile or they perished.
During the investigation, officials Volkov and Tsitsianov more than once came to the conclusion that Saltykova, being at large, hinders the course of the investigation: the peasants, who were dependent on the landowner, were afraid of her and rarely spoke during interrogations on the merits.
On November 6, 1763, an extract from the case was sent to the Governing Senate in St. Petersburg, in which it was proposed to use torture against Saltykova. In addition, it was reported that it was necessary to appoint a property manager for the suspect, and it was also proposed to remove the landowner from managing estates and funds in order to deprive her of the opportunity to put pressure on witnesses and give new bribes to officials. The investigators did not limit themselves to these requests and decided to resort to the last resort - to conduct a "general" search, during which they would interrogate all the peasants living in the area.
Permission to torture Saltykova was not obtained, but the other requests of the investigators were granted. The landowner Saltykova was removed from managing her own property, appointing a manager in the person of Senator Saburov.
In early February 1764, the landowner Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova was officially announced about the arrest and the forthcoming torture. A priest was assigned to her, who was supposed to prepare the arrested woman for a difficult and painful test and possible death. The duties of the priest also included persuading Saltykov to help the investigation in order to remove sin from the soul. The minister of the Moscow Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Dmitry Vasilyev, had conversations with Saltykova for a whole month, but he failed to persuade her to make a sincere confession.
On March 3, 1764, Dmitry Vasiliev submitted a report to the College of Justice, in which he informed the investigators that Saltykova "was prepared by him for inevitable torture."
Since the investigators did not have a sanction for torture, they found another way to increase the pressure on the suspect. On March 4, 1764, Daria Saltykova was taken to the mansion of the Moscow police chief, accompanied by guards. The executioner was brought to the same mansion, Saltykova was informed that she had been brought to be tortured. But it was not the landowner who was tortured, but a completely different person, in front of Saltykova's eyes. The investigators expected that this performance would impress her, but they were mistaken, Saltykova did not react in any way to the torment of the tortured. After the next interrogation, Darya Nikolaevna, smiling broadly, answered the investigators that "she does not know her guilt and will not slander herself."
Stepan Volkov, trying to prove Saltykova’s guilt, decided to once again ask permission to torture her, but on May 17, 1764 he received a final ban: “Her Imperial Majesty was ordered by decree not to repair either her (yard) people or torture her.”
In the first ten days of June 1764 "general searches" were carried out in several places at the same time. Searches were carried out in Moscow on Sretenka, where Saltykova's house was located, and in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow. The total number of those interrogated during the search at Sretenka was 130 people. To the surprise of the investigators, most of those questioned were able to give the exact dates of the murders and the names of the dead.
During the interrogation of the yard peasants of Saltykova, it turned out that in March 1762, a conspiracy of five people formed among Saltykova's household servants: the Shavkunov brothers, Tarnokhin, Nekrasov and Ugryumov. They went to inform the Moscow authorities about the crimes of the landowner. The serfs-conspirators knew that the landowner had excellent relations with the highest ranks of the Moscow police, and decided to file a complaint with the Senate office. At night they ran out of the house, but Saltykova missed them and sent a chase after them. All five fugitives were detained, later in the office they talked about all the murders of people committed by Saltykova, two weeks later they were taken to the Senate office, where they were interrogated and returned back to the landowner. Those who fled were flogged and sent to Siberia. In addition to this incident, the investigators managed to find out the names of people who witnessed the murders of Yermolai Ilyin's three wives. A large number of people were able to confirm the presence of obvious injuries on the bodies of the deceased women.
The general search in Troitskoye also brought unexpected results. The number of respondents exceeded three hundred people. The investigation became aware of some crimes and accomplices of the landowner.
In the summer of 1762, the yard girl Fekla Gerasimova was killed. The elder of the village of Troitsky, Ivan Mikhailov, who was transporting the corpse of a tortured girl, testified and named witnesses who could confirm his words, including police doctor Fyodor Smirnov, who examined the body of the murdered woman in the premises of the Moscow provincial office.
The investigation was to shed light on the deaths of 138 people, of which 50 were officially considered "dead from illnesses", 72 people were missing, 16 were considered "left to her husband" or "gone on the run." The serfs themselves accused their landowner of killing 75 people. But not all the crimes accused by Saltykova had witnesses and exhaustive evidence.
The investigators concluded that the landowner was guilty of the death of 38 people and is suspected of killing 26 more. Saltykova was acquitted of the death of 11 people, the investigation considered that the serfs wanted to slander their mistress. In the general list, formed and submitted to the Justice College, 75 people were victims of Saltykova, only 38 of them were recognized as dead as a result of bodily injuries - beatings. The most important issue that occupied the investigators at that time was the preparation for the murder of the nobleman Nikolai Andreevich Tyutchev.
Tyutchev was a member of love relationships with Saltykova, but preferred to marry another. The offended woman attempted three times on his life and the life of his wife. Having prepared a makeshift bomb with the help of serfs, Saltykova ordered to lay it under the house where Tyutchev and his wife lived, but the attempt failed twice, as the peasants were afraid to commit the murder of a nobleman.
Saltykova knew that the unfaithful lover should soon leave for Tambov on official business, and decided not to miss this opportunity. She sent over a dozen serfs into an ambush to kill Tyutchev. But one of the peasants sent the nobleman an anonymous letter in which he warned Tyutchev. Surveyor decided to go under guard. When the landowner was convinced that the guards were traveling with Tyutchev, she decided to postpone her plans and no longer remembered it. The investigators considered the information about the attempt on Tyutchev to be reliable, the landowner was found guilty of "maliciousness on the life of Captain Tyutchev."
In the spring of 1765, the investigation in the Moscow Justice College was completed and sent for further consideration to the 6th department of the Governing Senate.
The judges found the landowner guilty, but did not pass the verdict, believing that the empress should make a decision on this issue. Throughout the second half of September 1768, the Empress repeatedly returned to the question of Saltykova's final verdict.
Kill Tech
Saltykova Daria Nikolaevna was extremely bloodthirsty and ruthless killer. The tortures she carried out against the serfs were prolonged and perverted. Saltychikha could torment her victims throughout the day. If the mistress got tired of injuring, she ordered her peasants to continue torturing the victim for her, stepped aside and watched the bloody spectacle. Under fear of punishment, the serfs carried out any will of their mistress.
The murders of Yermolai Ilyin's wives by Saltychikha are called the most egregious. The first wife of the landowner's groom was Katerina Semenova, the duty of the "yard girl" was to wash the floors. Katerina caused an attack of aggression in the hostess by poor performance of duties. Saltykova flogged her with batogs and whips, as a result of which Semenova died. This happened in 1759.
The second wife of Ilyin did homework, it was Fedosya Artomonova. Her fate was not much different from her predecessor, Saltykova again did not like the work of the girl, after which the standard punishment followed. In the spring of 1761, the girl died.
At the end of February 1762, Yermolai's third wife was killed. Aksinya Yakovleva was distinguished by a quiet disposition and good looks. This time, the cause of the anger remained unknown. According to witnesses, the landowner attacked the girl and began to beat her with her own hands, first with her hands, then with a rolling pin, then with a log. The girl died without regaining consciousness.
The last victim of the landowner in 1762 was Fekla Gerasimova. After the standard beating procedure, the girl was buried alive. On the body of the victim there were numerous hematomas, abrasions, on the head in places the hair was torn out by the roots.
Daria Nikolaevna was a great inventor. After being beaten with a log, she liked to put hot curling irons on the ears of the offenders and drag them along in this way. According to witnesses, almost all the people beaten to death had no hair on their heads. Murders in the Saltykova house entered the system around 1757. In December of that year, a pregnant serf was beaten to death.
Among the victims of Saltykova, men appeared twice: in November 1759, Khrisanf Andreev died during a daily torture, and in September 1761, Saltychikha beat the boy Lukyan Mikheev to death.
Judgment and execution
The Empress herself made the decision in the Saltychikha case. Eight drafts of the verdict are known, drawn up by Catherine II. Saltychikha was sentenced to death, and then this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the underground cell of the Ivanovo Monastery. The landowner was deprived of her title of nobility, forbidding even in court to use the name of her father or husband, all her funds and estates were transferred to her children. Saltykova was forbidden to communicate with people and send correspondence, the light in the cell was allowed only during meals.
In 1768, on October 2, Catherine II sent a decree to the Governing Senate, which described the punishment imposed on Saltykov and the procedure for its implementation. In the decree of the Empress, Daria Saltykova was called by the most derogatory words: "an inhuman widow", "a freak of the human race", "a completely apostate soul", "a tormentor and a murderer".
Saltykova was sentenced to deprivation of the title of nobility and a life ban on being named after her father or husband. She was also sentenced to one hour of a special "reproachful spectacle" - the landowner stood chained to a pole on the scaffold, and the inscription "tormentor and murderer" hung over her head. After her, Saltychikha was sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication.
The presence of light was allowed only during meals, and the conversation was exclusively with the head of the guard and a woman nun. Also, by her decree of October 2, 1768, Catherine decided to return all the property of the mother to the two sons of the condemned woman and punish Daria Saltykova's accomplices. In addition to Saltykova, the following were recognized as guilty: a church minister, the priest of the village of Troitskoye Stepan Petrov, as well as one of the “haiduks” and grooms of the landowner, unfortunately, the names of these people did not appear in the decree. The sentence was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow.
In the monastery, a special chamber was prepared for Saltychikha, which was called "repentant", its height did not exceed 2.1 m, the room was underground, there were no windows in it, the light could not penetrate there. The prisoner was not allowed to walk, she was taken out of the dungeon only on major church holidays, to the small window of the temple, so that she could hear the bell ringing and watch the service from afar. Not a single document has survived to our times that would indicate the repentance of Saltychikha.
She was in the dungeon of the Saltykov monastery for 11 years, after which she was transferred to a stone annex of the temple, in which there was a small window and a lattice. Visitors to the monastery were allowed not only to look at the convict, but also to talk to her. There are rumors that after 1779 Saltykova gave birth to a child from a guard soldier. The former landowner was kept in the stone annex of the temple until her death. She died on November 27, 1801.
Versions about Saltykova's mental disorder and her latent homosexuality
Version one
Forensic scientists and historians agree on one thing: in the case of Saltykova, there is a serious mental disorder. It is believed that she was an epileptoid psychopath. It is in people with such a diagnosis that outbreaks of unmotivated aggression often occur, which lead to the most cruel and sophisticated murders. Epileptoid psychopaths attack people in a state of extreme irritation. This category of persons has the following features: an unreasonable gloomy mood that increases over a long time, sadism, which can manifest itself both in relation to animals and in relation to people, the inability to control anger even in cases where it poses a danger to the life of the psychopath himself, low sexual activity, a tendency to hoarding, jealousy, reaching extreme forms.
Saltykov fits this description perfectly. According to contemporaries, she was a gloomy woman with an eternally bad mood, who was in extreme anguish. Her sadistic tendencies were highlighted during the investigation.
The assassination attempt on Captain Tyutchev serves as further evidence in favor of this version: Saltykova was unable to control her jealousy, which reached its extreme forms.
Version two
Of the huge number of people tortured by Saltykova, the majority were women, mostly young and pretty. There is a version that encroachments on the lives of women testify to the latent homosexuality of Saltykova. Many epileptoid psychopaths demonstrate their homosexuality through humiliation and beating of sexually interesting objects.
The landowner Saltykova, before attacking her victim and subjecting her to the most sophisticated tortures, watched the girls wash the floor for a long time. Saltychikha attacked her victims from the back and unexpectedly.
Somehow I read: no man is capable of tormenting people so subtly as a woman. Of course, I doubted it. Fiends by gender? This is something new. It turned out that nothing is new under the sun. It turns out that in the history of each state there is more than one shameful page on which the names of sadistic women are inscribed in black ink. Russia, unfortunately, is no exception.
Today's story is about the infamous Saltychikha.
It was in the 18th century, during the "flourishing" of serfdom. Radishchev was the first to speak out against him. Legalized slavery, the right to own living property, he called "a terrible evil that corrodes the body of the country." Serfdom- this is a monster, it does not consider the peasants to be people, its laws allowed the nobles to believe that they have the right to single-handedly control the fate of the serfs. The landowners, feeling their impunity, could flog an innocent, sell any member of the family, cripple, take their lives. For the time being, the authorities turned a blind eye to such atrocities. Why? So after all, the "blue blood" stands above the common people, and it is not worthwhile to put the nobles on trial for such "insignificant offenses." The word "crime" was not used in this case.
Not always and not all atrocities got away with it. For example, the formidable Saltychikha (Daria Saltykova, nee Ivanova) was put on trial. Of course, neither she nor the other nobles even believed in the seriousness of the authorities' intentions. But Empress Catherine the Second, who “was told about all the lawlessness committed by her Saltykova without embellishment and concealment,” was simply horrified. She ordered the matter to be thoroughly studied, and Saltychikha to be roughly punished, so that others would be disrespectful.
The machine of justice began to spin, and facts began to be revealed, one more terrible than the other. The investigation began with the last murder. In 1762, Fyokla Gerasimova, a yard girl of a landowner, became her victim. The investigation found that on the day of the "murder" Saltykova was out of sorts. She handed out cavils, slaps in the face, slaps and kicks generously. She first pulled Fyokla by the hair, tearing out her entire top, and then beat her with a log. The girl seemed dead, and Saltychikha sent her to the estate so that the headman ordered to bury the body. According to one version, he followed the order, they buried the girl, although they saw that she was still breathing. Another version is that the headman was frightened by the sight of the bloodied victim and called the police.
The story received publicity, it was no longer possible to hide the fact of the murder. And then two more men managed, who knows how, to break into the office of Catherine II, fall at her feet and file a petition. Their wives were killed by the "cursed murderer" with my own hands. Moreover, one of them was married three times, the lady herself picked his wives, and then brutally killed them. If not for Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, then there would be no trial, no investigation.
Saltychikha tried to give bribes to avoid trial. Fearing the wrath of the empress, the investigators worked zealously. They immediately found out that over the course of five years, the peasants filed twenty-one (!) Complaints with the police. But none of them have been investigated. Moreover, many complainants became victims of a vengeful lady.
The nobles were shocked, because Daria has always been respected in society. They began to remember how much money she donated to charity, how sweet and kind she was during receptions and balls. And the serfs, elders and managers of all the estates and houses of Saltykova gave different testimony. And there was no reason not to believe them.
It was revealed that
- after the death of her husband, Gleb Saltykov, Daria Nikolaevna remained a widow, having two sons in her arms;
- her husband left her a rich inheritance - estates in three provinces, three huge mansions in Moscow and more than six hundred serfs, so that the lady did not need anything;
- the courtyards (all as one) showed that even during the life of her husband, Saltykov was “hot at the hand, she did reprisals quickly and personally,” but, apart from bruises and a strand of torn hair, there were usually no injuries;
- after the death of Gleb Aleksandrovich Saltykov, his widow quickly realized that no one was holding her back. She began to beat the serfs more often, especially the female servants. The lady tried to disfigure or cripple the girls, her favorite "fun" was pulling out the hair on her head. Fully. This particularly struck the investigators who exhumed the corpses. Six graves were opened, the skulls of all the girls were without hair.
- The first murder took place in 1758, and, apparently, it was accidental. The mistress became angry with the maid, hit her on the head with an iron, and then for about ten minutes "took care of her with a log." The girl died, but no one knew about this case. The parents did not dare to complain, and the rest, knowing the character of the lady, were silent.
- Two months later, a second girl was killed, a week later a third. From then until the arrest, the terrible conveyor worked without failure.
- Saltykova had accomplices - haiduks (as her guards were called) and one of the yard girls. When the mistress got tired, the haiduks beat the victim. The girl cleaned up traces of blood and helped bury the bodies.
- The death of one hundred and thirty-eight people has been reliably established, of which seventy-five Saltykova killed personally. The rest were tortured and finished off or left to die by her haiduks.
- It has been absolutely proven that Saltychikha used torture. The investigators reported that "this lady took hot baking tongs for curling her hair and dragged the girls around the house, pinching their ears." Women were scalded with boiling water, their hair was burned with a candle or a torch, they were brutally beaten, exposed naked to the cold or driven into a pond of ice water and waited for them to die. Saltychikha did not regret the young peasant woman Larionova, who had a baby. Having mocked enough, she ordered to flog her to death, and put the corpse in the cold. The child was placed on the mother's chest. The kid is cold.
- Among those killed by Saltykova are two men and one boy.
- From the household book kept by the headman, it became clear to whom and how much money Saltykova was paid so that no one would know about her “sins”.
This information shocked secular society. The ladies could not believe that the dearest Daria Nikolaevna turned out to be such a monster. They remembered her family, her grandfather, who served Peter the Great himself and held important positions in the state. The men either jokingly or seriously gossiped that the lady had gone mad from long abstinence. She would have a good man, so she wouldn’t be mad. They objected, recalling that Darya Nikolaevna had a long affair with Captain Nikolai Tyutchev. He had an affair with a mistress, but he did not want to marry her, he chose another as his wife. By the way, she also tried to kill him and his young wife. Thank God, the haiduks turned out to be cowardly, and instead of blowing up (!) Tyutchev's house and staging a secret assassination attempt, they warned him.
Rumors crawled, passions ran high, and the investigation was in no hurry to complete. But when the scale of the crimes committed by Saltykova was fully established, a trial had to be held. And not simple, but demonstrative, "so that it would be repulsive for everyone else to act outrageously." Neither at the trial nor after the verdict, Saltychikha did not repent, she did not admit her guilt, she did not shed a single tear. She only grinned when witnesses spoke of her atrocities.
The court considered eleven cases of murder unproven, roughly punishing those peasants who dared to slander the lady. In twenty cases, the court found that there was not enough evidence. As a result, only thirty-eight "murders committed by Saltykova personally and cruelly" remained.
Neither the court nor the Senate passed the punishment on her, leaving it to the empress. She thought for a long time, wrote out eight drafts and decided not to betray the “dishonorable murderer” to death. Daria Saltykova was deprived of her noble rank, forced to stand at the pillory for an hour, and then exiled to the Ivanovo Monastery. To sit for life in a cell underground, not to see the light of God, not to communicate with people.
From now on, her life took place on two square meters. Pitch darkness, a candle for fifteen minutes a day during meals. She spent eleven long years in the Saltykov dungeon, but she never repented, she considered herself undeservedly condemned. Then they changed her conditions of detention, settling in an annex of the temple of the same monastery. The extension was stone, cold. It had a small window covered with a thick grill. Parishioners crowded for hours, looking at Saltychikha. Someone shamed, someone spat in her direction. There were also compassionate ones - they served bread.
The "murderer" died at a respectable age: in November 1801 she turned 71 years old.
Her crimes were studied by psychologists, criminologists, historians. The general opinion is that Saltykova was a psychopath and, most likely, had, along with sadistic, homosexual inclinations. This explains the number of women killed by her.
She was buried at the monastery cemetery, in the same grave with her son. On the stone, one could clearly see 138 crosses scratched by someone - the number of victims of the sadist and savage Daria Saltykova.
Loading...