In the history of Russia in the 18th century, a landowner nicknamed Saltychikha, who became famous in her time for her incredible cruelty towards serfs, left her bloody mark. On January 13, 1764, Empress Catherine II, who then ruled the Russian state, gave an order to the sixth department of the ruling Senate to declare strict instructions to the Moscow noblewoman Saltykova. The order referred to the demand for repentance on the part of Daria Nikolaevna for the crimes she committed, otherwise she would be tortured until such a confession was obtained.
A noble noblewoman was immediately arrested and taken to Rybny lane in the city of Moscow to the police in the courtyard of the Moscow Chief of Police Ivan Ivanovich Yushkov. In order to intimidate a thirty-three-year-old widow, an escaped criminal was tortured in the basement of this site in front of her eyes for several hours in a row. Imagine the amazement of the police when all this time they saw only an arrogant smile on her face. At the end of the act of intimidation, Saltychikha proudly declared that there was no fault for her and that she did not intend to slander herself.
As the secret investigation of the police department revealed, in reality, the bloodthirsty landowner killed 139 serf laborers. Famous for her cruel fanaticism, the lady lived in the center of Moscow, where, almost openly without hiding, she committed her crimes against helpless people. Daria Nikolaevna's husband died, making her a lonely widow at the age of 25 with two young sons, Fedor and Nikolai. Then she became the full-fledged manager of all her and his estates with the peasants. From the very first days of her rule over her serf slaves, Saltykova showed her ruthless disposition and craving for violence against people.
She humiliated and tormented the slaves, personally beat them with rolling pins, shafts, logs, lashes, a heavy iron and other weighty utensils that came under her arm. The inventive Saltychikha used all kinds of torture on the peasants, burned their hair with fire, scalded them with boiling water, burned their faces with hot hair tongs, which, in her opinion, had been guilty of all the serf servants. Mainly serfs and women suffered from the evil landowner.
The lackeys dragged the wounded victims out of the house and finished them off in the yard. Saltychikha lovingly called the lackeys specially selected for punishment haiduks. The Gaiduks beat the guilty peasant with particular frenzy and cruelty, while the lady usually watched the ongoing torture from her windows and shouted to her servants to beat them harder, anyway she would not be charged anything for the death of a slave. The victims were buried in the cemetery behind the church built in the Troitskoye family estate (now the village of Mosrentgen, Leninsky District, Moscow Region) back at the end of the 17th century by the landowner's grandfather, Duma clerk Avtonom Ivanov.
Almost a fourth of the serf souls belonging to her, Saltychikha lived off with her torture and executions from the light, and how many unfortunate people were left to live with disabled people under her management, the historical archives are silent about this. Whether a young woman with a manic tendency towards sadism was mentally ill, it is impossible to confirm or deny this. The fact is that in the middle of the 18th century, psychiatry, as a medical science, had not yet been practiced in Russia in order to competently diagnose mental illness.
According to the research of historians, Saltykova received a fairly good education at home, knew how to read and write competently, was a fairly enlightened secular lady at the level of the 18th century, because the Saltykov family was close to the royal court. Otherwise, Daria Nikolaevna's short-term love affair with retired captain Nikolai Andreevich Tyutchev, who was engaged in general land surveying, and at that time lived in the neighboring village of Troparevo, would not have taken place in 1762. Realizing her unbridled cruel violent temper, Tyutchev (later the grandfather of the famous Russian poet) hastened to move away from Saltykova and married a young poor landowner Pelageya Panyutina.
Undivided passion gave rise to a thirst for revenge in the mistress, wild with anger. She began persecuting the Tyutchevs, literally hunting down the newlyweds. Saltychikha hired robbers to kill the spouses on the Kaluga road, on the way to their estate. Then she bought gunpowder to blow up the house on their ancestral estate. However, all her attempts to destroy the young Tyutchev family were in vain, as if fate itself kept them.
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Forced peasants complained 23 times to Saltychikha, but in each case her wealth and influential relatives did not give a go to the proceedings, and opposite all the complainants were punished and sent into exile. However, in 1762, two peasants who lost their wives due to the atrocities of Saltychikha were able to get through to the empress herself and file complaints directly with Catherine II.
The investigation lasted eight whole years. First, the death sentence was announced to Daria Saltykova, and she even stood for an hour on the scaffold with the inscription "tormentor and murderer." From that time on, she was defamed, that is, she was deprived not only of her entire fortune, the title of a column noblewoman, she lost her surname, but for the first time, on the personal instructions of the empress, she lost the right to be generally considered a woman. Famous for her liberalism, Catherine II abolished the death penalty for Saltychikha, and assigned her life in solitary confinement in an isolated basement of the monastery.
The prisoner lived for 11 years in the underground of the Ivanovsky Monastery and then from 1778 for more than 22 years in a cell specially attached to the wall of the main cathedral, in which there was a small window, hung from the outside with a sackcloth. Everyone could come up, pull back the curtain and look at the outlandish gas chamber. She died on November 27, 1801, the same year as her youngest son. Her relatives were buried in the Donskoy Monastery next to the deceased members of the Saltykov family.
The image of Saltychikha is rather an edifying image of that oppressed serf period, when Russian women were not considered human and lived in a downtrodden state of power. The case of Daria Saltykova, in addition to the outwardly show trial, in the case of the torturer and murderer, who received what she deserved, also had a seamy side associated with the internal secret policy of Empress Catherine II.