Execution by impaling a criminal was practiced by many Slavic, Germanic and other Western European peoples. It was widespread in Russia as well.
Most often it was applied to state criminals, traitors, members of the opposition, rebels - in a word, everyone who did not please the supreme power in the person of the monarch. Also impaled for adultery, abortion, murder of babies.
Execution technology
During this cruel execution, the criminal slowly sat down on a sharpened stake with all the weight of his body and died painfully for a long time from painful shock and exsanguination. The massacre always took place in the central square of the city or another place of execution, where any witness could watch it. Publicly, such a cruel and long torture was carried out so that "others would not be familiar."
The "technology" of conducting was as follows: a thick wooden stake, sharply sharpened at one end, was driven into the man's anus, and into the woman's vagina by several tens of centimeters. Then the stake was installed vertically and buried in the ground. As a result of this, the victim settled on him for a very long time, spontaneously piercing his internal organs.
The executioner made sure that the stake did not reach the heart and the victim did not die prematurely. To do this, he installed a horizontal bar at a certain level. The execution could last from 10-15 hours to 4-5 days. They invented such a cruel method of killing in the II millennium BC. in Ancient Egypt, Assyria and the East. In those distant times, all the same rebels and women-infanticides were executed in this way.
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The most famous examples of executions
Ivan the Terrible respected this type of execution very much. He was "in charge" of the impalement, as well as a host of other types of savage executions by his oprichnik, the legendary sadist Malyuta Skuratov. At the Execution Ground in Moscow, boyars, servicemen and worldly people suspected of high treason were imprisoned. But even after Ivan IV, this favorite execution of Russian tsars did not lose its popularity.
In the summer of 1614, the state traitor, Cossack ataman Ivan Zarutsky was impaled. Being the favorite of Marina Mnishek, he was an accomplice of False Demetrius I and participated in almost all the main conspiracies of the Time of Troubles. For all these "feats" the troublemakers were sentenced to one of the most cruel executions in Russia.
The son of the famous voivode Stepan Glebov was also executed by impalement. He was accused in connection with the first wife of Perth I, Evdokia Lopukhina, which was equated with high treason. Adultery was already the second point of the guilty verdict. Stepan was executed in March 1718 in a severe frost. The convict was first severely tortured. Then, on Red Square, in front of a crowd of 200,000, they were naked naked and impaled.
Glebov suffered for 14 hours. A sheepskin coat was thrown over him so that the criminal would not die an hour ahead of time, freezing in a 20-degree frost. His disgraced mistress was forced to watch the torture. When Stepan finally died, his head was cut off, and his body was thrown into a common grave. Even this seemed to the Tsar not enough. 4.5 years later, on his orders, the Holy Synod betrayed the late lover to the empress imprisoned in the monastery to eternal anathema.
